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MOTIVES OF LIFE. 



MOTIVES OF LIFE 



DAVID SWING 




NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION 



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BRIGHT ' 



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CHICAGO 
A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY 

1889 



NOV 13 1889 g 1 



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Copyright 

By Jansen, McCltjrg and Co. 

A. D. 1879 



Copyright 

By A. C. McCltjrg and Co. 

A. D. 1889 



PREFACE. 



By the title " Motives of Life," not all motives 
are implied. The things which move men, and 
should move them, are not so easily counted. The 
speech over them cannot be condensed into a small 
volume. Yisiting a large forest in June, you can- 
not bear home with you all its great old trees; you 
may carry back only a few boughs from elm and 
oak. Unable to recall for young and old all the 
things that should create and bless labor, I bring 
here from the inner and outer worlds a few remind- 
ers of great duties and great rewards. 

D. S. 



CONTENTS. 



I. Intellectual Progress, - - 11 

II. Home, 37 

III. A Good Name, 63 

IV. The Pursuit op Happiness, 87 
V. Benevolence, - - - - - 115 

VI. Religion, 139 

VII. Beauty, ------ 165 

VIII. The Christ-Motive 191 

IX. The New Imagination; A New Impulse op 

Life, - ... 217 



INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 



MOTIYES OF LIFE. 



INTELLECTUAL PEOGEESS. 

It has been inquired by metaphysical phi- 
losophers whether man is the powerless creature 
of external motives, or whether he possesses a 
will-power which may bid defiance to all things 
outside of self. Upon the replies to these 
questions depend other replies regarding 
human responsibility for conduct, and then 
upon these second replies depend certain third 
deductions touching punishment. Let us all 
be happy to commit such forms of thought to 
the Edwardses and Hamiltons and all the stu- 
dents of fate and free-will, and let it be our 
pleasure in all our days to confess that the mind 

en) 



12 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

is swayed by motives, just as the branches of a 
tree are bent by a wind. The most useful 
lessons of life are not those conclusions which 
by long and doubtful processes are reached 
by the intellects called "deep" — the Kants 
and Comptes and Lockes and Hamiltons — but 
rather those lessons which lie on the surface 
of society in the garb of every-day facts. We 
all know that there are external things which 
puli our minds this way and that ; and we also 
feel that there is a personality within us which 
can resist or obey this outward entreaty. 
There are two sets of ideas all through nature — 
the phenomenal and the absolute. The sun- 
rise, which we all so much love, is an apparent 
fact ; the absolute fact is that the earth turns 
over. Philosophers tell us that the absolute 
color of the rose lies in its power to dissolve 
the rays of light and to reflect into our mind 
only one of many beams ; but the phenomenal 
fact is that the rose is red, and further we think 



INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 13 

not and care not. There being thus two forms 
of fact, it is the phenomenal or apparent fact 
which we most love. We love the common, 
popular sunrise, and must leave to others the 
final philosophy of the event; and we all love 
the red rose, and must consign to the deep 
philosophers the last possible argument about 
that crimson blush. 

With similar principles let us come to 
speak of motives of human life ; not as philoso- 
phers who seek a definition, but as friends who 
are anxious to talk together about making the 
best use of our allotted time. We do not 
desire an analysis of sunrise — we only wish 
to have the sun put in a daily and blessed 
appearance. We are all swayed by motives. 
As winds carry the thistle-down all the way 
over the Atlantic and plant in Canada the weed 
of Britain, so great winds take us up when we 
are children, and also when we are men and 
women, and transport us to far-away gardens 



14 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

of happiness or deserts of sorrow. Even great 
nations and great epochs have been driven 
along by some dominant impulse : the Persians 
and Arabians by pleasure, the Jews by religion, 
the Greeks by beauty, the Romans by conquest, 
the * Id Germans by war and wanderings. What 
is true of large groups of men is true of each 
heart ; and here we are to-day, each one being 
drawn along over the hills and dales, by not 
the steeds which drew the sun, nor by the lions 
which drew the car of the haughty conquer- 
ors, but by never-abating motives many and 
powerful. These motives are many and change- 
able. There are changes for each hour. But 
from amid this endless variety there rise up a 
few large ones which for the most part rule the 
whole of life. As there are some mountains 
which overtop all others and some rivers which 
make other rivers seem but brooks, so there are 
motives whose excellence leaves them without 
any significant rival. 



INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 15 

If you will look either outward upon society 
or inward upon self, you will find that the 
human soul is drawn along by the angels of 
good, or its boat is impelled by the winds — 
trade-winds — sweeping a large sea. Man is 
impelled by the desire of intellectual culture, 
by the motive called home, by considerations 
of fame, by the hope of pleasure, by love of 
mankind, and by religion. Education, home, 
fame, happiness, benevolence and religion, are 
the great motives of action and thought. Into 
each heart all these impulses should enter and 
abide. They should come to man in his youth 
and remain with him to the end. But such a 
group of motives is too large to be thought of 
in one hour. Let each one then claim an hour 
for itself. It seemed at first thought that these 
would be themes for the young, but instead of 
being thus limited they are themes for us all, 
for no one of us can live so long as to be beyond 
the charms of education, home, fame, happi- 



16 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

ness, benevolence and religion. There is no 
logical or chronological order for these motives. 
Each one of them is as long as life, and the 
order of treating them will simply be an order 
of convenience. 

The first thought of shall be intellectual 
progress. To possess a cultivated mind, and 
to have some general knowledge of the world 
around us, both in its material and living 
kingdoms, is such a hunger of the soul that it 
may be called an instinct. There are tribes 
of savages so low in mental action that they 
have no desire to add to their stock of informa- 
tion. Their brains have never been sufficiently 
aroused to enable them to think. They have 
not the mental power that can frame a regret. 
Sir John Lubbock found tribes so stupid, so 
sleepy, that any remark he might make to 
them about Europe or America, about steam- 
ship, or telegraph, or railway, seemed to annoy 
them by disturbing their intellectual repose. 



INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 17 

The distance between the uncivilized races and 
the civilized ones is almost like that between 
a walrus-oil lamp and the sun. The moment 
you pass into a civilized land, ancient or mod- 
ern, the mind is seen to be awake, and to be 
hungry for ideas. " Give me knowledge or I 
shall die/' has been the plaintive prayer of 
almost countless millions. 

No doubt the human race has sought gold 
too ardently, and does so still, but we must not 
suffer that passion to conceal from us the fact 
that in all the many civilized centuries, this 
same race has with equal zeal asked the uni- 
verse to tell man its secrets. We have been 
not only a money-seeking race, but we have 
been rather good children, and have studied 
hard the lessons on the page of science and 
art and history. If, when you look out and 
see millions rushing to and fro for money, you 
feel that man is an idolater, you can partly 
dispel the painful thought if you attempt to 



18 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

count the multitude who in that very hour 
are poring over books, or who in meditation 
are seeking the laws of the God of nature. 
Millions upon millions of the young and the 
old are in these days seeking at school or at 
home, in life's morn or noon or evening, the 
facts of history and science and art and reli- 
gion In order to be ourselves properly 
impelled or enticed along life's path, we must 
make no wrong estimate of the influences which 
are impelling mankind, for if we come to 
think that all are worshiping gold, we, too, 
despairing of all else, will soon degrade our- 
selves by bowing at the same altar. It is nec- 
essary for us always to be just. We must be 
fully conscious of the fact that there are many 
feet hurrying along through the places of 
barter, intent on more gold, but so must we 
be conscious that there is a vast army of young 
and old who are asking the great world to 
come and tell them its great experience, and to 



INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 19 

lead them through its literature and arts, and 
down the grand avenues of history. You saw 
the fortune, you read the will of the last mil- 
lionaire when he died, but did you with equal 
zeal mark how our scholars hurried to the far 
West to study the last eclipse of the sun, and 
how a score of new sciences met on that moun- 
tain summit to ask the shadow to tell them 
something more about the star depths and the 
throne of the Almighty? When the Chal- 
dean men of science attempted to learn the 
truths of the heavens, they were compelled to 
look up with the eye only. All they had was 
the eye and a loving heart. They filled sev- 
enty volumes with their imperfect studies. A 
comet they were compelled to designate as a 
star that carried a train behind and a crown 
in front. When the time of our late eclipse 
drew near, what a procession of arts and of 
instruments moved far out to where the shad- 
ow would fall ! And others had marked just 



20 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

where the darkness would come and the second 
of its coming. As man can measure the 
width of a river, and find through what spaces 
it flows, so modern learning marked out that 
river of shade and built up its banks, and 
along came the brief night and flowed in them 
most carefully. But the astronomer went not 
alone ; the science which can catch a picture in 
an instant ; the science which can analyze a 
flame millions of miles distant, and tell what 
is being consumed ; the science which can an- 
nounce in a second a fall of heat ; the science 
which can convey the true time two thousand 
miles while the excited heart beats once — these, 
and that grandest science which can see the 
rings of Saturn and the valleys of the Moon, 
assembled on that height in the very summer 
when we are lamenting most that mankind 
knows no pursuit except that of gold. That 
Rocky Mountain scene only faintly illustrates 
the intellectual activity of our era. If the pas- 






INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 21 

sion for money is great in our day, it is also 
true that the intellectual power of the same 
period is equally colossal. No reader, be he 
ever so industrious, can keep pace with the 
issue of good books, and money itself is 
alarmed lest the new thoughts and invention 
of to-morrow may overthrow its investment of 
yesterday. Stocks tremble at the advance of 
intellect. 

A glory of this intellectual passion may be 
found in the fact tnat it is not confined to a 
group of scholars, as old inquiry and education 
were confined, but like liberty and property, it 
has passed over to the many. Not all the mul- 
titude of the world are gold-seekers, but on 
the opposite there are tens of thousands of men, 
and women too, who are lovers of truth more 
than of money, and are standing by the foun- 
tains of knowledge with no thought or expec- 
tation of ever being rich. Education and 
knowledge, the power to think and to enjoy 



MOTIVES OF LIFE. 



the thought of others, have long since trans- 
formed a cottage into a palace. Thus, although 
society seeks too fondly the money-prize, yet 
he will do great injustice to our land who fails 
to see what an immense motive of life this 
pursuit of knowledge has always been and 
remains. If then we would go through our 
years aright, we must not believe that the air 
around us is all poisonous with the incense 
burned to Mammon, but that there is also a 
sweetness in the w 1 * id coming from the altars 
where the millions of truth-lovers kneel. 

The young are taught in our day that the 
gates of society open only when Money knocks, 
but from what part of society has passed before 
our observation we all see the utter falseness 
of such teaching, for when money opens her 
house and sends out her invitations, one always 
sees in the drawing-room the equality of all ; 
lawyer and doctor and clergyman and actor 
and singer and inventor and artist, who have 



INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 23 

no hope of fortune and who have barely money- 
enough to procure neat apparel ; and many of 
the invited and honored guests are so entirely 
free from fortune that they cannot even ride 
to the rich man's house in a carriage. You 
will find in all these assemblies given by the 
money-kings, welcome guests who have no vir- 
tues except education and good manners. And 
further, there is no large number of extremely 
rich persons in our land; but there is a large 
multitude of those who have the means of a 
comfortable life, and with these all mental pos- 
sessions rank as high as possessions of stocks 
and lands. 

We thus must note that in the pursuit and 
possession of culture and information we see 
a life-motive, old and grand, and available to 
all. None are shut out and none are unblessed. 
In the earliest history of man this impulse 
began to make noble all who bowed to it. It 
took a blind singer of Greece and made him 



24 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

outlive kings; it made deathless iEsop who 
was only a slave, and the man who was a tinker 
and the boy who held horses at the door of the 
theater. It has ornamented whatever it has 
touched in all the long history of man. What 
it has always done it will always do, and no 
youth can look into good books for even only 
a few moments each day, and can take that 
nabit with him into all his or her subsequent 
life without becoming transformed into a new 
likeness. For these few motives of which we 
are to think are but laws of the Almighty 
for human growth and happiness, and as he 
who breaks them is cursed, so the one who re- 
gards them is rewarded. When a man pursues 
money only, his features become narrowed ; his 
eyes shrink and converge; his smile, when he 
has any, hardens; his language fails of poetry 
and ornament; his letters to a friend dwindle 
down to a telegraphic dispatch ; he seems to 
have no time for anything, because his heart 



INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 25 

has only one thing for which it wishes time. 
What he calls the pressure of business is often 
only the want of any other pressure about 
the heart; but when the soul carries along 
with its gold-seeking a love of learning and 
all study, then the very face adds each year to 
its expressiveness, and the eyes and mouth and 
the marks on the face are taxed to the utter- 
most to express the noble soul dwelling with- 
in. As trees grow heaviest on the side where 
the light falls, so the face shapes itself to the 
light of the soul. 

God made man in His image — so the Bible 
assures us. But we learn the deep meaning 
of that text by looking at the universe of the 
same God. We find that He made man capa- 
ble of becoming an image of God. God did 
not make Adam a learned man, nor a poet, nor 
a painter, nor an orator, nor a statesman; but 
He made man capable of resembling the divine, 
and having done this He gave laws for this 

9, 



26 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

human ascent. And this scene of old Eden is 
repeated — the option is repeated to all who come 
into this garden of existence. To you in your 
cradle of twenty or thirty years ago, God came, 
and to you He still comes, with the whisper, 
" You may put on the image of deity." He 
did not place you in that state, but He placed 
your cradle on its confines. 

Is this motive of life really available to all? 
Is it not a bauble, except to persons of leisure 
or to members of the learned professions? Not 
at all ; but on the opposite, it is one of the divine 
laws of all human being. All who assemble 
in these auditoriums, all who compose the 
modern public, not only may, but they must, 
make information and mental and spiritual 
development a ruling impulse and work of all 
these years. There are two forms of inform- 
ation. There is a technical study which 
belongs to those in a peculiar pursuit. You 
need not know as much about language as that 



INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 27 

German knew who published a volume on two 
Greek particles ; nor need we know as much 
about medicine and law and electricity as is 
known by the adepts in those sciences. But 
there is a large world — one of principles — a 
universe full of history and poetry and art and 
morals, in which not to walk at least a few 
steps daily is a form of sin against ourself and 
our Maker. The mind is not best developed 
by the details of the world's truth. The Ger- 
man who devoted his life to a study of the 
"dative case" made a sacrifice of himself for 
the benefit of all scholars and students. He 
beggared himself that others might be rich — 
that others could avoid such a waste of time. 
You and I need not work out a table of loga- 
rithms from 1 to 10,000, nor need we calculate 
interest-tables for all sums at all per cents, and 
for all numbers of days. A few men or a few 
machines can do this work for the entire human 
race for all future time. The study which per- 



28 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

tains to us all and will bless all, is the study 
of those general and ever-changing facts which 
none can study for us, and which, if others 
should study them for us, would leave us miser- 
able. The great truths of history, the outlines 
of all science, the riches of language, the inspi- 
ration of poetry, the thrilling careers of the 
heroes of liberty, of science and religion, the 
propositions of religion itself, the history of art ; 
all these shapes of learning just as truly invite 
you and me as the sea asks us to look upon its 
face, or the spring invites us to see its green 
leaves and feel its southern wind. As you 
would not appoint a committee of naturalists 
to go forth each day in May and see if spring 
was coming ; as you do not ask the gardener to 
tell you how the rose looks and how the violet 
smells, so you dare not ask any professional 
man, lawyer or physician or clergyman, to read 
for you the tablets where the historian and the 
poet and the prophet have sat down and en- 



INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 29 

graved all the deeds and the emotions of the 
mightiest. No one can hear music for you; 
no one can love a child or a country or a June 
day for you; and thus no one can take your 
place in this gallery where hang the pictures 
of the living and dead nations, and where all 
the old eloquence still speaks. 

The education of our common schools, even 
of our highest colleges, only prepares us for 
the study and meditation of the subsequent 
fifty years. There we all studied words — their 
roots, their grammar; there learned how to 
make words with a pen, and there the hundred 
details of reading, writing and arithmetic. The 
college simply adds Greek and Latin and Ger- 
man words and higher arithmetic, but the real 
information of the mind begins when after years 
have brought you to words as put together by, 
Shakspeare and Dante and Carlyle and Macau- 
ley, and by all the multitude of thinkers in 
science and morals. In school you learned 



30 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

how to write a thought, how to make the let- 
ters, how to spell the words ; but then comes 
the real trial and pleasure of life, namely : to 
have a thought to be spelled and to be written. 
Thus the intellectual pursuit widens out after 
you leave the college, and grows larger as the 
years multiply the white hairs. 

In intellectual pursuits, therefore, is found 
one of the lofty motives that are to impel us 
all along this seventy-year journey. It must 
belong to all, because all possess a mind and a 
soul. It asks only a half hour a day of time, 
and those half hours it exalts and expands, 
until at last their colors decorate the whole days 
and years in which they come. These half 
hours become like a drop of the attar of roses, 
which will soon lend to all the laces and rib- 
bons of a Queen its enchanted air. These 
hours will lift even poverty from its complaint 
and foreboding, and will help the young and 
the old to resist the allurements of vice. 






INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 31 

It is particularly essential in our times that 
all, even the men and women of middle life, 
continue or resume the daily communion with 
the best new wisdom of the age ; for the world 
moves and changes so rapidly that the lessons 
we learned when young must be unlearned or 
revised, that they may be once more true and 
fresh and inspiring. If the church-going mul- 
titude will not read and will not place in the 
hands of their young men the best conclusions 
of the greatest Christian scholars as to the foun- 
dations of our faith and the essential Christian 
creed, they need not wonder if an eloquent pub- 
lic orator shall come along, and with his "Mis- 
takes of Moses" make infidels of thousands 
who only a few years ago were full of the com- 
mon Christian belief. The new studies of the 
non-believing must be met by the new studies 
of Christians. Each era must perform its own 
task. God has no more made arrangements 
for an indolent church than for an indolent 



32 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

science ; and hence as rapidly as the so-called 
infidel opens and criticises our books, we, the 
so-called faithful, must also open them to see 
if anything we said or our fathers said was 
partly true and partly false. There are hun- 
dreds of Christian scholars from Tholuck and 
Christ 1 ieb and Dean Stanley and Colenso to 
Dr. Ort and Dr. Knappert and the Presbyte- 
rian Professor Smith, whose most careful and 
devout studies will help place any thinking 
young man upon the rock of Christian faith. 
But the same youth, if supported only by the 
Christian theories of the past generation, can- 
not but fall at the first assault of the enemy. 
Neither we old men nor our young men can 
enjoy our faith or defend it by the conclusions 
and arguments of the past. It was the glory 
of Protestantism in the outset of its career that 
it espoused information and inquiry. It parted 
company with Home because in Pome the 
Word was bound. All the modern churches 






INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS. 33 

came forth led by new studies and new conclu- 
sions; and now three hundred years have 
passed and the same Protestantism can win a 
new triumph by opening once more the study 
of the history and the doctrines of its divine 
religion. It can withdraw from its own errors 
as it once withdrew from the errors of Home. 

Among the motives of life that must urge us 
all onward, let us place the constant develop- 
ment of the mind and the daily accumulation 
of knowledge. This motive will blend per- 
fectly with the motives of business and all 
pleasure. It displaces nothing of life's good, 
but many of its evils. It destroys idleness, it 
plucks the charm from vice, it quenches the 
thirst for riches, it brings us nearer to all times 
and nations, and binds by tender ties to all the 
noble living and to all the noble dead. As for- 
eign and wide travel breaks up the local preju- 
dices of the mind, and makes all the world seem 
to be the home of man and all the dwellers upon 



34 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

it to be brothers, so the long and wide reading of 
the world's truths beats down the walls of parti- 
tion and transforms the reading, thinking one 
into a better friend and citizen and Christian. 
The late years, deserted of passion and beauty, 
are not lived by such a mind in superstition or 
darkness, but amid great pencils of light which 
are forerunners of a sunrise beyond the grave. 



HOME. 



It 

HOME. 

Among the objects which have pulled long 

and hard at the heart-strings, one must hasten 

to class Home. It will be difficult to bring 

such a theme under a treatment of prose, and 

into any philosophic analysis, for it is a topic 

of so much sentiment and of such rich colors, 

that it has been by common consent assigned 

to the genius of poets, as being unthinkable 

except in the rhythm and drapery of verse. 

As the highly colored birds do not fly around 

in the dull, leaden plains of a sandy desert, 

but amid all the settings of nature's leaves and 

blossoms, and lights and shades — nature's 

framework of their picture — so there are truths 

which do not appear well in arid fields of 

philosophic inquiry, but which demand the 
(37) 



38 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

colored air and the bowers of poetry to be the 
settings of their charms. As there is a condi- 
tion of the heart which makes it scorn the 
tones of conversation, and urges it to break 
forth in song, so there are shapes of life which 
would gladly escape from the touch of prosaic 
styles, and ask justice from painter and poet. 
Home is one of these high-born ideas. It has 
always warned away Pulpit and Bar, and 
Bench and Tripod, and Desk and Platform, 
and has begged for the permission to be treated 
by a higher inspiration than these forms of 
speech can bring. And yet we must at times 
disregard this eternal fitness of things, and 
seek those facts about home which have made 
it so worthy of poetry and song. It might be 
that we are all being deceived by the singers 
of song and the weavers of poetry. 

Home is a complex notion. It branches out 
like the springs of a river, and with its large 
and small tributaries covers a whole continent ; 



HOME. 39 



or rather, it is a sun which lights up other 
worlds than itself. It throws its life-giving 
beams down upon the political planet and upon 
common industry and upon character and hap- 
piness. As a group of planets circle around 
our sun, and are all blessed by it and carried 
along through the Mays and Decembers of a 
million years, so around that star which mor- 
tals call "House," there move silently quite a 
group of such bodies as State and industry and 
happiness and character. 

This fireside warmth, this light upon the 
hearth, shines upon industry and stimulates its 
growth and shapes its meaning. Almost all 
that war of trade which we hear in street; all 
this running of car and sailing of ship, arises 
from the breast of man while he is in pursuit 
of his home. The young men and the old 
men who shall pour forth into the street to- 
morrow to resume the daily task, will do so at 
the command of that idol of the heart called 



40 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

home. The captain who shall sail his ship, or 
who is now watching the compass in the high 
seas, will sail or watch at the bidding of that 
house or spot somewhere which he hopes to 
bless by his coming. Much of the world's 
hard toil goes into the taxes which sustain 
governments, and much of its earnings is trifled 
away and lost, but by far the greatest quantity 
of the money all toil after goes into the com- 
fort and decoration of the home where the 
loved ones dwell. When the old buried cities 
were exhumed, what a light the uncovered 
walls shed upon that institution which is our 
theme to-day ! The most of earth's ruins had 
been the ruins of temples and theatres and 
aqueducts and pyramids, because it was only 
those vast structures which contained the ma- 
terials which could resist the action of time. 
The homes of the people, built of lighter sub- 
stances, soon mingled with the dust, and left 
the great Past to whisper to us only of palaces 



HOME. 41 



for kings and temples of the gods; but when 
the volcano buried suddenly two cities, it em- 
balmed in soft ashes the homes of the multi- 
tude, and bade them sleep two thousands years, 
and then rise up and tell us what a beautiful 
and powerful thing the home of man has been 
in all his civilized career. The marble floors, 
the painted walls, the playthings for the chil- 
dren, the lamps, the polished mirrors, the or- 
namented glass, tell us how busy were the 
fathers and husbands and brothers and wives 
and daughters, in that far-off time, all toiling 
to make and decorate and preserve the do- 
mestic roof. The temples, and viaducts, and 
pyramids are at last the most conspicuous ruins, 
but could the old homes all speak they would 
tell a dearer, more touching story than could 
be thundered forth by pyramid or Parthenon. 
Letters are extant from lawyers who toiled at 
their profession in the Roman Empire two 

thousand years ago; and one of these strong 

2* 



42 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

men confessed, when in exile for a time, that 
he could scarcely read a letter from home or 
write one to his home because of his tears. 
And to a friend in Greece the same toiler wrote: 
" If you see in Greece any piece of statuary that 
will ornament my library, buy it for me, even 
should it be expensive." 

Thus at a glance we perceive that the vast 
industry of man does not gravitate about the 
word commerce, nor around the word money, 
nor around the word king or president, but 
around the word " home." Of all the multi- 
tude you will see to-morrow on the streets in 
the discharge of business duties, it is safe to 
affirm that the vast majority will be impelled 
by the love of a home that is or that is to be. 
Industry being the absolute salvation of man, 
how great is the influence of that circle which 
sends us forth each day to our work, and which 
renders the work pleasant because it is per- 
formed for the sake of the blessed fireside. The 



HOME. 43 



work of a slave must be emptied of pleasure 
because it is a toil which builds up the house 
of another and leaves the worker in poverty 
and despair ; but on the opposite, how sweet the 
toil of a freeman since all the hours of such 
industry go towards the home of to-day or 
to-morrow. The cottage with its half acre 
around it, with its few fruit trees, with its gar- 
den and its vines, is the poor man's savings 
bank, where his extra shillings take the form 
of a tree or a shrub or a new half-acre which 
no American or Scotch director can steal. 
Thus the idea of home branches out and in- 
cludes the idea of industry within itself. Its 
light touches that star and makes it bright. 
It not only creates industry, but it gives it a 
noble purpose. And it does not demand enor- 
mous labors nor the accumulation of riches. 
Man can take any good and enlarge it into a 
curse. Man can take prayer or all religion 
and exaggerate it, until it becomes a deformity. 



44 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

Man can go crazy after music. He can buy 
dogs until he is a half maniac, and he can 
travel the land over for fine horses, until in his 
mind the earth is only a pasture field — a turf 
for his steeds. And thus the love of a home 
may become degraded into only a mania for a 
house — a house that shall surpass all houses — 
a house born, not out of the home feeling, but 
out of rivalry and ambition. That home 
which makes up a God-ordained motive of 
life, and which has led the human heart captive 
in all ages, and which will lead the world cap- 
tive until all shall go to Heaven, is one of the 
most accommodating ideas known to the heart. 
Home costs just what you may be able to pay 
easily. It adapts itself to your income. Un- 
less it does this it will not be a home ; it will be 
a perpetual care. If the income be large, then 
its walls may become marble and the grounds 
large, but if the means of the candidate for a 
home be small, then the grounds must dimin- 



HOME. 45 

ish or else they must locate themselves outside 
of the city's limits, and the walls must become 
wood, and the decorations must all decline in 
cost, but not much in beauty. The home 
must be loaded, not with mortgages, but with 
vines; and inside must be human beings; not 
full of vanity, but who know what man is, and 
who know that rich and poor are all one 
in the absolute reality, and will soon be all 
one in the dust of the grave. 

Our home idea having thus reached out to 
touch industry and property, it now reaches 
out and involves the idea of marriage. But 
nature does not deal in absolute universals. 
There are and have been persons who have 
found or are finding life's best mission in being 
homeless. There are persons who must go 
from place to place or almost dwell upon the 
sea. The home is not a universal necessity ; 
and so marriage is not the destiny of all. It 
is a common or general goal, but not designed 



46 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

to be a universal shape of earthly pilgrimage. 
Hence the word " home " does not imply the 
marriage of all and everybody, for God's world 
has few laws that have no exceptions. All 
must die; all must breathe and eat; but soon 
the word "must " withdraws its despotism and 
the milder reign of "may " assumes the throne. 
Beautiful often are those homes where the son 
or the daughter, or the sons and daughters, 
live on in the parental house, helping the loved 
parents gently along the last years of this world, 
and where the orange blossoms never at last 
come. One dare not object to this, for nature is 
so full of exceptions that we cannot but feel that 
God meant that all forms of being should per- 
vade our world and make it more beautiful by 
variations. As home is a general idea, so mar- 
riage can claim only to be a general custom. 
Toward this general custom the thoughts of 
home reach forth. Into the home, be it of 
thatch or of marble, this large friendship 



HOME. 47 



enters. The pictures and books and furniture, 
modern or antique, play but small part in the 
composition of the home compared with that 
companionship which exists between the souls 
within. Home depends wholly upon the one- 
ness of all its inmates. If, when the father 
comes into the parlor the children gently slip 
out to be in some room where the father is not; 
or if, when the husband is present the wife is 
half afraid and is silent for fear speech may 
not be welcome to the greatness of the lord and 
master, home is there in only a modified and 
half-painful form. Fear of anybody is a good 
thing in jails and for criminals, but it is a poor 
element in a home. Oneness of heart from 
roof to cellar — a oneness which reaches even 
to the domestics — is the constitutional principle 
of the ideal home. It is most probable that 
such terms as " love at first sight " must be 
stricken from our modern philosophy, and that 
we must substitute for them "love for good 



48 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

reasons," and thus found homes, not upon a 
small hand or the grace of an attitude, or upon 
the genius of a Worth, but upon a most won- 
derful amount of good sense on each side of 
the interesting case. When marriages are 
formed upon a sudden fancy, divorce courts 
will always be busy, or else there will always 
be unhappy homes ; for the suddenness of a 
romantic fancy is fully equalled by the sud- 
denness with which it fades. Common sense 
alone will tell when a companionship has come 
which will bind two hearts together for life's 
good or ill. In presence of this common inter- 
est and inseparable attachment, the meaning 
of money and the meaning of brick and mar- 
ble and frame, and plain and grand, are all 
one; these terms being rendered insignificant 
by the overshadowing worth of the friendship. 
It is alleged that the modern girl candidate 
for marriage has her ideas of house and con- 
tents pitched to such a height that the young 



HOME. 49 






man of ordinary income and ordinary prospects 
cannot undertake to carry forward the same 
high tone of this life-music ; but all we older 
persons have observed that the daughters who 
possess most education and most intellect are 
perfectly willing to start their enterprise in a 
plain way. They not only are willing, but 
they glory in it. They only ask that their com- 
panion be a man of industry and refinement 
and good sense. As for those who are called 
the "butterflies of fashion," and there are male 
individuals of this species, no provision need 
be made for ever bringing them to a marriage 
altar. They should be omitted from all in- 
quiries as to the great motives of life. It is 
said that John Bunyan's wife brought him not 
so much as a fork or a knife or a spoon, but 
only herself and two good books ; but it after- 
wards appeared that she was herself a complete 
world without the silver spoon accompaniment. 

But we must move away from this uncertain 
3 



50 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

ground to repeat that man's home rises up be- 
fore the human race as one of the powerful 
winds that fills the sails and wafts along the 
ships. How the heart almost breaks when it 
must leave home ! Not only the little children 
but all we older children are compelled to shed 
secretly a few tears when we must leave for a 
time the indescribable charm. Strong-hearted 
and strong-minded men feel that to fly over to 
the old continent and ramble there a half year 
will be a supreme delight, but when the wheels 
of the steamship make their first revolution 
and the friends on the shore wave adieu, how 
the heart sinks and how the whole physical 
frame protests against the great separation! 
And amid all the wonders of the foreign 
world, the home left behind pulls at the heart 
of the exile, and at times comes the feeling of 
regret that even for all this pageantry of ruins 
and art, one should have left that fireside more 
divine than pictured wall or sculptured rock. 



HOME. 51 



In the night a song comes over the deep — 

Come home ; 
Come to the hearth- stone of thy earlier days ; 
Come to the ark, like the o'er- wearied dove ; 
Come to the sunlight of the hearts' warm rays 
Come to the fireside circle of thy love. 

Brother, come home. 

Come home ; 
It is not home without thee ; the lone seat 
Is still unclaimed where thou was wont to be ; 
In every echo of returning feet, 
In vain we list for what should herald thee. 

Brother, come home. 

And thus has the whole world thought and 
wept and cried in all its touching history. 

This house, cottage or palace, with its attached 
inmates, reaches out and sustains powerful rela- 
tions to the State. It is one of the marvels 
of history that such a genius as was that clas- 
sic who denned an ideal republic should have 
declared that all the citizens should belong not 
to any family but to the State, and that all the 
children should be reared by the State in 
public buildings. Thus the term, father and 



52 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

mother, son and daughter, husband and wife, 
were all to be swallowed up in the word citizen. 
In a nation that must live by war, only such 
a theory might claim to be not wholly insane, 
but all the latter ages have made the notion 
one of the wildest ever entertained, for it is 
now seen that each great nation comes from 
the number and intelligence of its home-groups 
of men and women. It has always been the 
homeless rabble that has opposed the law and 
order of the world. And it has always been 
the men who had homes to defend and bless 
who have toiled to check tyranny and establish 
liberty. That cot in the valley, that log house 
in the woods, that modest house in the village, 
those costlier residences in the city which so 
pull at the heart when the inmate leaves them ; 
these all pull at the soul, too, in days of 
political conflict, and have turned out for battle 
long lines of heroic troops. Home surpasses 
"West Point in training for the battle-field; for 



HOME. 53 



if the latter can supply an art, the former can 
supply an inspiration more effective than tac- 
tics. According to Macaulay's Lays of Ancient 
Rome, and indeed according to plain history, a 
most despotic monster was swept from power 
in a few days by a people who saw him lay his 
armed hand upon the home of a most humble 
citizen. That whole poem of Virginia may 
well stand forever as an expression of the rela- 
tion between the Throne and the Home. And 
in our day this relationship has become still 
more intimate, for the Throne has abdicated 
many old rights, and the Home has put on in- 
creased education, and has been granted new 
prerogatives. The old despot has faded away 
into a citizen-king or queen or president, and 
the power thus cast aside has been assumed by 
the fireside. 

Against the madness of a mob our land can 
always oppose the interest and power of its 
domestic hearth. In olden times the homeless, 



54 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

made such by despotism and by ignorance and 
by superstition and idleness, were a multitude 
so numerous that upon almost any day they 
could overthrow or disturb the government; 
but for a hundred years our land has been 
removing the chains of ignorance, and super- 
stition and idleness, and has been gathering 
into homes millions who in other ages would 
have been either a turbulent mob or the armed 
troops of a despot. Thus that home which 
figures first in romance as a place which love 
builds, and then figures in poetry as the dear- 
est spot on earth — from which going we weep 
tears of sorrow — to which returning we weep 
tears of joy, passes up out of this sentimental 
vale and re-appears in politics more inspiring 
than many drums, more powerful than a 
tyrant's sword. 

Only allusion can be made to the qualities of 
this potential motive. It is seen to branch out 
and touch industry, and awake and direct it; to 



HOME. 55 






touch marriage and invite it, and lay plans for 
its life-long happiness; and then to touch the 
great affairs of State and become an ally of a 
good king or a good president. So it reaches 
out once more and touches intellect and heart 
with its almost angelic wings. In the peace 
and security and happiness of this abode, and 
under its impulse toward industry the intellect 
is awakened and the heart is led out of itself. 
Some great minds may have been reared in a 
closet, and from a garret addressed a world, but 
such events are exceptional. Almost all those 
minds which have stood forth in beauty, and 
which still stand in history never to fade, arose 
not from the dens of any isolation, but from 
the fireside of a home. It took all the cares 
of domestic life, it took the wife and all the 
children, to weave the immortal chaplets of the 
central figure. The group kept the soul and 
mind bound down to the daily task, and made 
the task most pleasurable. Read over the 



56 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

names of the mighty ones, and what a vast 
majority of them were kept fully awake to the 
outside world by the restless life under the 
parental roof. In isolation the heart grows 
narrow, and the mind declines toward repose, 
and its sun sets soon, after a bad day. It is 
evidently the law of God that in early life 
along shall come the cottage or the mansion to 
pour a new inspiration into that soul from 
which the first visions of youth have faded. 
A public man now in the latter years of a long 
life wrote recently in a private letter : " I love 
the world more and my heart grows tenderer 
toward it the longer I live. I love the young 
deeply and feel that I am myself still down 
among their laughter, and pleasures and 
hopes." Now this letter comes from a home 
where the light of affection has joined with the 
sun in lighting up door-step and window, and 
where a modest library and a generous fire in 
the broad fire-place have combined with kin- 



HOME. 57 



dred spirits to make the place a source of a 
pure thought and a pure religion and an unfad- 
ing youth. What else could so influence the 
better thought and sentiments ? 

It would be well to ask you to mark the 
relation of the home idea to morals, but the 
subject has proven too large for the hour. 
We will always, all of us, fail to grasp these 
great motives which envelop us. As we can- 
not conceive of God, so must we fail to meas- 
ure fully these majestic expressions of His will 
His ways are above our ways. We can only 
each day take a few steps along His infinite 
shore. As one of the greatest of modern na- 
tions, unable to behold all the magnificence of 
the old empire of the Nile — unable to collect 
again the immense libraries of the Pharoahs ; 
unable to restore the massive architecture 
which reached from Thebes to Memphis; una- 
ble to remove to London a pyramid — could 
only box up a single monolith and drag that 



58 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

little emblem across the seas — so must we all 
at last confess weakness in presence of the 
motives which God has been building up in 
the thousand-year periods, and along the 
stream of human being. Unable to measure 
the length and breadth and sublimity of all 
or even one influence, we have chosen only a 
single stone— a monolith from an empire that 
demands our widest and deepest study. 

You need no extended advice, but only the 
hope that the young men of to-day will not un- 
dertake to pass these earthly years without ask- 
ing the ideal home with its impulses to come 
and lead and impel them by its many-shaped 
attractiveness. Towards that future home direct 
the industry and economy of the present. The 
mind in its thought, the hand in its skill, the 
iieart in its morals and warmth, the spirit in 
its religion, ask you to be busy to-day laying 
the foundations of this human temple, rival- 
ing in beauty the halls of art and even the 



HOME. 59 



shrines of God ; and your coming middle life 
and old age ask you to prepare for them its 
happiness and peace. Do not fear to picture 
it as rising up in years not far away, for the 
heart will decorate the morrow with something, 
and no other sketch will more honor the can- 
vas or be more easy of final fulfillment ; but 
paint it in simplicity. Let it begin softly, like 
a strain of music, that there may be room 
for higher notos further along in the great 
rhapsody. God will go with you, for He loves 
not more the altars of Himself than the fire- 
sides of His children. 






A GOOD NAME, 






III. 

A GOOD NAME. 

Among the motives which most influence 
mankind is included the winning of a name. 
From the fact that each heart loves itself fol- 
lows the fact that each heart seeks also the 
esteem of others. The longing for a good name 
is one of those laws of nature that were passed 
for the soul and written down within to urge 
toward a life of action, and away from small or 
wicked action. So large is this passion that it 
is set forth in poetic thought, as having a tem- 
ple grand as that of Jupiter or Minerva, and 
up whose marble steps all noble minds strug- 
gle — the temple of Fame. 

The Creator of man, in an infinite wisdom 
and kindness, has placed in the breast a group 

of incentives to large and constant action, that 

(63) 



64 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

by these infancy may be rapidly changed into 
manhood, and manhood be continually resolved 
into a yet nobler form ; and that by the aggre- 
gate of these individual movements barbarism 
may be lifted up into civilization, and civiliza- 
tion be perpetually raised to a higher degree. 
Civilization is only the aggregate of individual 
careers, and hence those impulses which lead 
the mind to seek education and a home and a 
name and happiness and a God, at the same 
time form a civilization which may retain for 
centuries those results which lingered only a 
few years with the individual. Civilization is 
the ocean of which the millions of individuals 
are the rivers and torrents. These rivers and 
torrents swell with those rains of money and 
home and fame and happiness, and then fall 
and run almost dry, but the ocean of civiliza- 
tion has gathered up all these waters, and holds 
them in sparkling beauty for all subsequent 
use. Therefore all those great billowy seas 



A GOOD NAME. 65 



which we call Greece or France or England or 
America, are places where the pursuit of prop- 
erty and fame and learning and happiness by 
the millions, has emptied their floods for a score 
of generations. Civilization is a fertile delta 
made by the drifting souls of men. 

The word " fame " never signifies simply 
notoriety. It implies only an honorable noto- 
riety. The meaning of the direct term may 
be seen from its negation or opposite, for only 
the meanest of men are called infamous. They 
are utterly without fame, utterly nameless ; but 
if fame implied only notoriety then infamous 
would possess no marked significance. Com- 
ing from the Greek phami and the Latin fama 
the word signifies that the public is speaking 
about your merits. Men meeting in the streets 
are asking each other if they have seen your 
elegant statue or painting, or have read your 
poems, or have seen your kindness to the poor, 

or have marked your patriotism or honesty or 
3* 



66 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

piety. The term thus implies that the public 
is confessing some honorable act of your life or 
skill of your hand or quality of your heart. 

It is amazing that so many great men have 
spoken so sneeringly of this innate impulse. 
Colton says: " Fame is an undertaker that pays 
but little attention to the living, but who bedi- 
zens the dead, furnishes out their funerals and 
follows them to the grave." Johnson and 
Young and Byron and Pope and a large group 
of such authors shot their pointed arrows at 
this divinity and broke down the doors and 
altars of her temple; but it must be that all 
these were looking only at the extreme long- 
ing for notoriety which has marked some 
careers, and burned up and ruined many 
minds. It is known that Byron and Young 
so courted public applause that they helped 
associate in men's minds ambition and madness. 
When we look at Alexander and Herod and 
Caesar and perhaps Napoleon, and mark how 






A GOOD NAME. 67 



in their histories fame became associated with 
innocent blood, the motive seems to fall from 
our touch and we desire to say nothing more 
in its defense. But the great motives of life 
cannot be measured in a few exceptional hearts. 
We cannot learn from a miser nor from a 
Croesus the worth of the human pursuit of 
property ; nor can we learn from a fanatic the 
worth of a religion ; but from these exceptions 
we must escape, and go to the human race and 
there find the value of the human love of 
money and the worth of the general tenets of 
religion. 

Go in studying that life-motive which is 
called a "good name," we must turn away from 
jie life of Alexander or Herod or Xerxes, and 
ask the large human race to tell us the high 
merit of this spiritual longing. We need not 
seek to know the value of that blare of bugles 
which may have greeted an Africanus who had 
ruined a Carthage ; or the market value of the 



68 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

popular breath which cried out before a robed 
king — " He is a god ! " — but we wish rather 
to read the gentle words of the sage, who said 
long centuries ago that "a good name was 
rather to be chosen than great riches." Other 
sages have said as much. Solon said that "He 
that will sell his good name will sell the State." 
Socrates said, " Fame is the perfume of heroic 
deeds." Our Shakspeare said, "He lives in 
fame who died in virtue's cause." Such words 
as these may well expel from our memory the 
contempt expressed by Byron and Young, and 
bring us to the conclusion that in the pursuit 
of an honorable name lies one of the God- 
ordained incentives of human conduct. 

Our theme is most practical. Our age is 
deeply influenced by the motives called prop- 
erty and home and pleasure, but it is a ques- 
tion whether the generation in action to-day 
and the generation on the threshold of this 
intense life are conscious fully of the worth of 



A GOOD NAME. 



an honorable name. It is impossible, as is thus 
always confessed, to compare together to-day 
and yesterday, and say that yesterday had 
more virtue or more vice ; and the same con- 
fession must be made over the influence of a 
good reputation upon the men of yesterday 
and the men of to-day. It is not known whether 
with us all a good name is less sweet than it 
was with our fathers, but this is painfully evi- 
dent, that our times do not yet sufficiently 
behold the beauty of character — their sense 
does not detect quickly enough, or love deeply 
enough this aroma of heroic deeds. It is 
amazing what multitudes there are who are 
willing to sell out their reputation, and amaz- 
ing at what a low price they will make the 
painful exchange. Some king remarked that 
he would not tell a lie for any reward less than 
an empire. It is not uncommon in our world 
for a man to sell out all his honor and hopes 
for a score or a half score of dollars. Within 



TO MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

a week two young men in the glory of twenty- 
one years, have become murderers for a few 
dollars. In one case it was simply hoped, not 
known, that the victim had a hundred dollars; 
and for this little sum the young man of fair 
fame turned friendship into an accomplice, 
asked pleasant conversation and a walk through 
the fields on a beautiful moonlit night, to help 
him kill a trusting companion. Our prisons 
are all full to overflowing of those who took no 
thought of honor. They have not waited for 
an empire to be offered them before they would 
violate the sacred rights of man, but many of 
them have even murdered for a cause that would 
not have justified even an exchange of words. 
There lies in our jail now a young physician 
who for a few cents killed the loved father of 
a family, and thus in one moment brought 
infinite sorrow to the two homes — the hearth 
of the slayer and the hearth of the victim, and 
measureless infamy to himself. Of this our 



A GOOD NAME. 71 



age is too full. Whether some new influence 
has come to cloud the value of personal char- 
acter, or whether the human race has always 
thus failed to read the laws of happiness, one 
may not tell; but this we must perceive: that 
our land is not yet conscious of the height and 
depth of that happiness that comes from a 
spotless reputation, and the depth of that misery 
which comes from this honor lost. 

One of the most striking instances of this 
awful folly — the flinging away of honor — 
comes to our mind now when we recall a per- 
son who for a handful of money terminated 
all his many friendships, and his friends were 
many, and kind were they and true. His wife 
was the most beautiful being the great West 
could send up to a bridal altar, and as amiable 
as beautiful. Her life, her premature death, 
the sacredness of her grave and her child — all 
friends and all these memories weighed noth- 
ing, and nothing was the weight he placed 



72 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

upon his own good name. All these sacred 
things he threw away to be a rich thief under 
a false name in a foreign land. So fearful is 
the price he has paid for his gold that it does 
not now seem that any arrest and trial and an 
imprisonment, even for life, could add anything 
to the bitterness of his cup. His hell began 
with his flight. 

If these painful events came only one to a 
generation we should say they were the result 
of insanity ; but they come in such startling 
rapidity that they must be confessed to spring 
up out of an age that does not study enough 
the worth of reputation — which expects of 
money alone a happiness it can never bring. 
There are some departments of human 
activity where the influence of a good name 
seems to be acquiring new power. In no age 
have literary genius and character appeared in 
closer alliance. A large majority of the Eng- 
lish and American thinkers wear whiter rai- 



A GOOD NAME. 73 



ment than clothed the souls of literary men 
in former times. The difference here is so 
large as to be visible. You may mention 
these noble names by the hour without coming 
to many which are tarnished. Macaulay and 
Carlyle and Wordsworth and Tennyson and 
Disraeli and Gladstone and Mrs. Browning and 
Huskin and a hundred compeers ; and on this 
side the sea, Bryant and Longfellow and 
Whittier and Emerson and the Carys and their 
compeers, join in showing that there is one 
class of living workmen who feel the necessity 
and glory of uniting in one soul genius 
and honor. Almost a hundred and fifty 
gifted poetic writers have become famous 
in England in the last forty years ; and no 
former era ever bound together so much talent 
and so much honor. It may be that there is 
something in literature which invites the heart 
towards a self-control and a moral develop- 
ment, and that by their calling its votaries 
4 



74 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

hold an advantage over the men who open 
banks or buy wheat or mingle in politics. If 
so we can bless God that earth has some green 
islands in its Saharas, and that our youth can 
escape the poison of too many commercial col- 
umns by turning to a literature composed of a 
higher order of thought. 

The Bench of the current times seems as 
pure as the closet of literature. It has been 
the happiness of the Bar and of the Press to 
congratulate the times over the fact that the 
judges in the higher courts, East and West, 
seem to draw their decisions from the law and 
the evidence ; and that whereas one age was 
happy in the possession of one honest judge — ■ 
Matthew Hale — our country is happy in the 
possession of many such administrators of 
justice. More and more for a generation or 
two have educated men in literature and in the 
professions sought to combine with their men- 
tal gifts and their position the fame of integrity. 



A GOOD NAME. 75 



It will be perhaps the quality of the future 
that what the present now demands of the 
Bench and of its historians and poets and 
essayists, it will demand of its business men — 
that their names shall be like those of the 
Whittiers and Emersons, ennobled by integ- 
rity. Fame is a gold-field which has not been 
fully uncovered. 

Were we to make a complete study of the 
career of honor, we should find some strange 
facts scattered here and there in its history. 
We should find little spaces of time when hon- 
or was more popular than fine houses or fine 
furniture. We should find a brief Roman 
period when the citizen gloried in his good 
name more than in his genius or physical 
powers. We should find a period when slaves 
were emancipated when they had reached a 
certain established excellence of character. 
(Lecky is the authority.) And then we should 
come to spots of place and time where each 



76 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

man became a hypocrite, and when a Seneca 
dared in a fearful manner to combine crime and 
religious philosophy. These would always be 
the dying hours — the death-chambers of the 
unhappy periods. 

In such a study we find that rewards must 
be offered for a good name just as they are 
offered for eloquence or genius or riches. If 
integrity were made the pride of the govern- 
ment, the love of it would soon spring up 
among the people. If all fraudulent men 
should go straight to jail, pitilessly, and if all 
the most rigid characters were sought out for 
all political and commercial offices, there would 
soon come a popular honesty just as there has 
come a love of reading or of art. It is with 
character as with any new article — the diffi- 
culty lies in its first introduction. Our steam- 
boat, our gaslight, began in much tribulation. 
It was difficult for any good music to get into 
a Scotch church. It took a hundred years to 



A GOOD NAME. 77 



get the organ into the Presbyterian churches 
of Pennsylvania. Many elders and deacons 
withdrew rather than imperil their souls by 
hearing such music. It will prove more dif- 
ficult to get the music of a good name intro- 
duced into our streets, and schools and homes ; 
but once there we shall perhaps be slow in 
going back to the horrid discord of the for- 
mer period. That this new virtue may come 
into favor, all our high rewards, those from 
the ballot-box, those from employers of tens 
and of hundreds, the rewards of society, the 
rewards of the press, should be offered only to 
the worthy. A few years of rewarding the 
worthy would result in a wonderful zeal in the 
young to build up, not physical property, but 
mental and spiritual worth. 

An actor having been asked a few weeks ago 
if there was not at present an unusual number 
of actors and actresses who were seen tc pos- 
sess real moral excellence, replied that there 



78 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 



was, and gave this as a reason : "That iti for- 
mer times the church gave them no hope of 
having any goodness acknowledged ; the con- 
demnation was perfectly sweeping ; but that 
of late years the community had become so 
much more just, that now an actor or actress 
enjoys the full hope and knowledge that the 
world will give them credit for every excellence 
of character." They see before them the same 
moral possibilities that lie before a scholar or a 
statesman or a lawyer. Thus, as rapidly as 
the world becomes just enough, and itself 
holy enough to appreciate and reward the 
good name, lo! out of this demand and this 
justice comes a new supply — the various avo- 
cations saying, " If you really appreciate good 
men and good women, then here we are! Your 
love has encouraged us to come." 

But let us pass from the value of a good 
name to the bearer, to mark for a moment its 
value to all who surround it. Fame in all its 



A GOOD NAME. 79 

shapes- -fame for invention or for poetry, or 
for eloquence, or for honesty, or for kindness, 
blesses not only its possessor but all the sur- 
rounding throng. It does not shut itself up 
in the little closet of one heart, but like the 
perfume of a violet, it hastens to get out of the 
little cup and scent the great air. No young 
man or young woman can by industry and 
care reach an eminence in study or art or 
character without blessing the entire family 
group. We have all seen that the father and 
mother feel that all life's care and labor were 
at last perfectly rewarded in the success of their 
child. But had the child been reckless or in- 
dolent, all this domestic joy — the joy of a 
large group — would have been blighted for- 
ever. Some of the touching episodes in history 
are accounts of those hours when a Christine 
Nilsson went back to her humble home, carry- 
ing to a cottage the triumphs of her song ; and 
when a Macaulay's work began to quicken the 



80 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 



heart-beats of those looking to him, not simply 
for support, but for happiness. There have 
been triumphs at old Rome, where victors 
marched along with many a chariot, many an 
elephant, and many spoils of the East ; and in 
all times money has been lavished in the efforts 
of States to tell their pleasure in the name of 
some general ; but more numerous and wide- 
spread and beyond expression, by chariot or 
cannon or drum, have been those triumphal 
hours when some son or daughter has returned 
to the parental hearth beautiful in the wreaths 
of some confessed excellence. Even if fame 
emptied all its good in only one heart — in its 
possessor's heart — it would be a most sacred 
impulse, for spiritual peace and joy are not so 
plentiful in this world that you and I can afford 
to throw them away or neglect the sources 
from which they come ; but when to this con- 
sideration we add the fact that all personal 
goodness immediately passes out of self and 



A GOOD NAME. 81 



settles down like a sunshine upon whole fields 
of human life, the obligations of an industrious 
and ambitious and moral career become solemn 
and yet sweet. 

When certain mockers have made sport of 
fame, they must have forgotten what treasures 
the world has drawn out of this mighty im- 
pulse. We all know of the quarrels that have 
grown out of ambition. The papers tell us 
that the singers quarrel ; and that the painters 
differ, and often pettishly break friendship; 
but we remember that men and women are only 
children ; and when we remember that Paul 
and Barnabas were jealous of each other and 
separated, and that out of their ambition there 
grew up a powerful religion ; when we remem- 
ber that Angelo and Raphael and Bramante 
quarreled long and hotly, and that yet out of 
their ambition grew the most magnificent period 
of art, we prefer to endure the quarrels if we 
can have the final blessings of their ambition. 



82 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

A quarrel is the childish thing of an hour, 
but the ambition of a Paul or an Angelo or an 
Isaac Newton, is the blessing of all subsequent 
times. Castelar said of Bramante and Angelo 
" that their names driven apart in the small 
days of strife were now reconciled in immortal- 
ity." Mankind will forgive you all many child- 
ish words and deeds if only they can see that 
your ambition is bringing to science some new 
truth, to discovery some new machine, to char- 
acter some new charm, and thus to humanity 
some new happiness 

Let us sum up now the study of the hour. 
Do we not reach these conclusions : that a 
name for honor and wisdom, or for honor and 
art, or for honor and invention, or for honor 
and genius, is more to be desired than all out- 
ward possessions ? We looked at the utter 
wretchedness of the men who threw away rep- 
utation, and would rather be rich criminals in 
exile than be loved friends and persons at 



A GOOD NAME. 83 

home. We have noted how proud mankind 
is becoming of honorable scholars and judges 
and honorable business men. We found that 
our age must build up reputation by hasten- 
ing to reward it. We then saw that fame 
passes out of self and blesses first the father's 
heart and the mother's heart, and then it flies 
out upon the broad world to be like a Christ, 
who moved away from a manger to dwell near 
all thrones and homes. It remains that you, 
ye young and ye old, cannot afford to bear the 
burden of an empty or an evil name. A good 
name is a motive of life. It is a reason for 
that great encampment we call existence. 
While you are building the home of to-mor- 
row, build up also that kind of soul that can 
sleep sweetly on home's pillow, and can feel 
that God is not near as an avenger of wrong, 
but as the Father not only of the verdure and 
the seasons, but of you. 



THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. 



IV. 

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. 

All pursuits are pursuits of happiness. The 
young men who are standing in presence of a 
group of professions, try to select one which 
will yield them not only a support but also 
the most of happiness. No man will of his 
own accord select an avocation against which 
his heart recoils. So universally does man 
seek personal happiness, and so widely does 
society in its organized forms seek this desti- 
nation, that many philosophers have declared 
happiness to be the final motive of all conduct — 
that all other motives are but shapes of this 
one all-prevailing influence. It is indeed true 
that no act of life can be found in which this 
reward of being may not be seen as a possible 

motive, or at least as an expectation, but that 

(87) 



88 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

all acts are done from considerations of the 
final welfare of the doer may well be denied, 
for without very clear proof we should not 
make man a creature of only self-interest. It 
is evident that all good conduct and all good 
character are inevitably joined with that result 
called happiness, and this is perhaps as far 
as the common mind can see in this direction 
in the spiritual world. 

While philosophers are ardently and almost 
vainly attempting to learn whether all actions 
and all virtue are to be explained by the influ- 
ence of this one pursuit, this truth remains for 
the common public, namely : that the pursuit 
of happiness, enjoyment, pleasure, is one of the 
most immense chases in which the human mul- 
titude ever joins. There are some who do not 
seek riches — perhaps because they were born 
into an old wealth which in generations has 
not increased nor diminished, or perhaps be- 
cause they were born so poor that the thought 



THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. 89 

of riches is a hopeless dream — and there are 
persons who do not seek a home, or a name or 
culture ; but persons who do not seek pleasure 
one can with difficulty discover. This crusade 
is one in which all join and march to this music 
in front of the mighty procession. 

Not every single individual of the human 
family has marched to this music, but no one 
shape of motive has come so near making a 
unit in one particular of the races and epochs 
of man. The history of the exceptions, could 
we find them and read them, would reveal to 
us only more clearly the fact that the Creator 
designed that all his creatures should seek, to 
a greater or less degree, personal pleasure. 
At least those who have attempted to shun the 
smiles and laughter and joys of earth, have 
found their method to be, not a form of devel- 
opment but a blight. In almost all histories 
of old lands we find a band of asceticism or 

stoicism drawn across the great pa^e — a black 
4* 



90 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

line in this wide spectrum. Some disappointed 
priest of some god, or some baffled politician, 
or some baffled lover, or some unbalanced brain, 
has gone out from almost every state of the past, 
and in some desert has founded an order and a 
philosophy, whose cardinal idea has been that 
man should mortify all his feelings and look 
upon all pleasure as a weakness. Before our 
era came with its Christian hermits, old India 
and Arabia, and the Nile Valley, poured forth 
these streams of monasticism. The Eremite 
was a man who fled from civilization and took 
to the desert (eremos, a desert), that he might 
escape pleasure. But even these the inborn 
love of happiness followed, for when one of 
these had made his cell or lodge in the bleak 
sand or rocks, he soon managed to have com- 
pany, and thus soon a hundred or a thousand 
hermits assembled in one valley or mountain or 
plain, that they who scorned all pleasure might 
have the pleasure of companionship. Although 



THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. 91 

they ate in perfect silence and with faces unre- 
lieved for years by a smile, and ate only 
little bread and oil and salt, and sat on a little 
bunch of straw by day, which bundle became 
a pillow at night, yet they wished the pleasure 
of society and always located in such a manner 
that each could see some companions of the 
common misery. In India, where the most 
miserable self-torturers exist, these seekers of 
suffering go in groups that they may have the 
pleasure of the company of each other. Thus 
these sets of men who have set forth with the 
cardinal doctrine of denying self, have hastened 
to gratify self by demanding the presence of 
companions. Thus has asceticism failed to 
root out from the heart the motive of happiness, 
because where it has vowed to be miserable it 
has asked the pleasure of companions in the 
distress, it asked the happiness of being seen. 
When this eccentricity of human nature 
passed over from the Pagan to the Christian 



92 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

world, it could not by any effort become a per- 
fect self-denial, for the recluses, the hermits 
and the monks, all betrayed points at which 
they wanted happiness to come in, and so rapid- 
ly did these points multiply and enlarge, that 
at last a monastery became a place where there 
was plenty of good food and good wine and 
good hearty laughter. To be fat and jolly as 
a monk became the quality at last of those 
orders whose founders had left the world that 
the body and soul might escape its sensual 
pleasures. Thus so stubborn is the natural 
law of pleasure that men who have set forth 
to oppose it have been found at last fatter and 
redder of face and jollier than those who 
remained away from this contest with the 
flesh and the devil. 

In so far as individuals have succeeded 
in overcoming the smile and joy of earth, 
to that distance have they also blighted the 
other natural powers of the soul. In the effort 



THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. 93 

to overthrow pleasure, these men have dragged 
down all else. The mind hastens to pass into 
a stupor when it has become convinced that 
there is nothing around it worth living for. 
The more the ascetic — be he Pagan or Christian, 
be he Stoic or a Fakir or a Monk — limits the 
horizon of pleasure in the best sense of that 
word, the more he limits the out-reachings of 
the mind and heart, and contracts the powers 
and works of his life. A suicide is a man 
whose heart has become perfectly emptied of 
joy and the hope of it ; and next to the suicide 
stands the ascetic, who holds the theory of the 
suicide but in a less real form ; he has the 
faith or creed of the suicide, but has not yet 
risen to his practice. 

A classic orator once spoke so powerfully 
about the worthlessness of human existence 
that his addresses were always followed by a 
sudden increase of suicides. We who from 
our happier era look back, cannot but feel that 



94: MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

the hatred some of our ancestors cherished for 
pleasure, made the world seem so small and ill- 
deserving that they did not care to extend 
toward it their esteem or their charity. From 
the years which they had sown broadcast with 
their hatred of laughter, they reaped a har- 
vest of indifference and coldness of soul. It 
mattered little to them how much their neigh- 
bor or their enemy suffered, for suffering was 
a dignified condition of body and mind, and 
was not half so weak a thing as loud enjoy- 
ment. If this stoicism enabled some men to 
be martyrs and to sing songs at the stake, it 
also made them willing to make martyrs ot 
others and to sing cheerfully at the burning 
of other bodies than their own. If asceticism 
had but one side to it — the ability to endure 
ills — it might pass for a virtue ; but it has 
always another side : the power to inflict ills 
— a vice for which a willingness to have one's 
thumb twisted or right hand burned is an 



THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. 95 

inadequate compensation. Thus the heroism 
of Cranmer and More and Knox, had its dark 
side, for the severity of philosophy which 
enabled them to endure well, made them 
equally powerful to inflict. The power to 
repel happiness has been too often joined to 
the inability to care for the happiness of others. 
It is no doubt true that some of the iron- 
hearted men in the past did great good in 
their day, but one may well be glad that their 
day has passed by, and that with the passing 
away of the men who could hold their hand 
in a blaze until it were consumed have passed 
away ; also the men who could without flinch- 
ing hold in the same blaze the hands of other 
people. Let us have, instead of iron-men, 
souls sensitive to joy and pain, for these only 
can measure fully the joy and pain of another. 
A sensibility to one's own happiness is pre-re- 
quisite to a conception of the happiness of oth- 
ers. How can man be anxious to bestow upon 



96 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

another that of which he himself knows but 
little? No doubt the poet Milton possessed 
immense learning and immense powers and 
heroism; but if story be true, his daughters, 
who are pictured as reading so affectionately to 
their blind father and the nephews about the 
Miltonian home, must have had often convinc- 
ing proof that their Paradise at least had been 
long lost. Much of the prose of Milton is 
marked by a ferocity of which our times can 
furnish no parallel. Having but one life to 
live, and having the choice of all times, one 
would be justified in locating his span of exis- 
tence in a happiness-seeking age, for only 
such an age would care for your tears and 
make any effort to dry them. Iron-men are 
noble to bear, but hard to be borne. 

When Christianity has in any way been 
made into a severe state or philosophy or char- 
acter, this bad result has been achieved by a 
wandering away from Christ and by a linking 



THE PUESUIT OF HAPPINESS. 97 

together of Mosaic law and Christian gospel. 
When our ancestors condemned and executed 
witches, they quoted Exodus 22 : 18, " Thou 
shalt not suffer a witch to live." When the 
Christian Church began to put to death all 
those who rejected its line of belief, it studied 
and imitated the example of Moses and Joshua 
in their extermination of the Canaanites. The 
early Christian Church studied, not its Foun- 
der, Christ, but its imaginary predecessor, the 
Mosaic Church, and put to death millions of 
non-believers because the Mosaic model had 
cut down the Pagans root and branch. Many 
of these olden-time writers explain persecution 
by quoting from Deuteronomy. One of them, 
Simancas, says that persecution to Death is 
right, because in the 17th chapter of Deuter- 
onomy we are told that stubborn unbelievers 
must be burned in sight of all the people, and 
that idolators must be led outside the gates and 
there be stoned to death. Our own ancestors, 



98 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

when they made the penal code of Connecti- 
cut, founded it as far as possible upon the Pen- 
tateuch. Again and again at the end of a law 
they cite the holy precedent for such an act of 
legislation. For example, we find on the Code 
this Blue Law : " If any child or children 
about sixteen years old and of sufficient under- 
standing, shall curse or smite their natural 
father or mother, he or they shall be put to 
death. See Exodus 21 : 17 ; Lev. 20 : 9 ; Ex. 
21 : 15." Again, " If a man have a stubborn 
son who will not obey the voice of his father 
or mother, and that when they shall have chas- 
tized him he will hot hearken unto them, then 
shall they bring him before the magistrate and 
testify that their son is stubborn and rebellious, 
and will not obey their voice and chastisement, 
but lives in sundry and notorious crimes, such 
a son shall be put to death. See Deut. 21 : 
20." You may study all you will and can 
the alleged cruelty of Christianity, and you 



THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. 99 

will find it all to have come from the assump- 
tion that Moses brought the perpetual will of 
God to earth, and that Christ and Moses were 
linked in an equal and everlasting partnership. 
Out of this assumption has come an endless 
amount of cruelty and blood and tears and 
sorrow. But the moment you dissolve this 
terrible companionship between the thunder 
of Sinai and the Sermon on the Mount, you 
perceive that Christianity comes bringing hap- 
piness and asking you to carry happiness to 
all within your part of society. Christ in his 
own true isolation was not an ascetic, but an 
advocate of human cheerfulness. There were 
no tears of sympathy falling down through the 
Mosaic times, such as rained down through the 
Bethlehem skies when Christ went from home 
to home and from village to village, cheering 
all, and healing all, and blessing all. The 
time for burning the skeptical and stoning to 
death the idolator rolled away like a black cloud 



100 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

after the Advent, and the new dispensation 
was seen blessing all, comforting the mourner, 
holding in its arms little children. The aus- 
terity of the Mosaic era Christ would not per- 
mit to envelope even the Sabbath, much less 
all the days of the week, for passing through 
the wheat-fields on Sunday, he commanded his 
companions to eat cheerfully of the sweet wheat, 
since the Sabbath was made for man, and not 
man for a Sabbath. At the wedding feast 
Christ harmonized with the festival and helped 
fill the wine-cup of the happy hours. Those 
lilies which Christ saw were not seen by the 
bloody men that put to death so willingly the 
Amoriteand the Perrizite, but they were tram- 
pled down by the rush of the horsemen and 
the iron chariots. In Christ you will perceive 
just that sensibility of soul which loves at once 
the happiness of self and the joy of all 
mankind. 

This must be said over all history, not only 



THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. 101 

of Mosaic times but of Gospel times, and all 
early periods : that it omits to picture to us the 
laugh and smile and delight of man, and ex- 
hausts its time upon those wars and events 
and characters which overthrew thrones or set 
up thrones or changed the maps of nations. 
History is a filing in and out of soldiery. It 
is a march of kings and queens. In all its 
long period no happy children are seen ; no 
feast is spread, unless like Belshazzer's it is to 
be followed by some calamity, and some poet 
is about to say: 

" Hour of the empire's overthrow — 
The princes to the feast are gone; " 

no marriage bell rings ; no mirth-making 
stories are told; no young people dance in the 
large halls. As kings were the large things 
of the by-gone centuries, around them moved 
all the chronicles of events from Ezra to Gib- 
bon, each writer composing his book as on a 
shield, and dipping his pen in an inkstand 



102 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

made of a skull or of a helmet. Looking 
into such a record our fathers shaped our 
religion to fit this funereal gloom, and gave us 
a worship in whose sombre presence pleasure 
partook of the quality of a sin or of a weak- 
ness. This being true, it is the privilege and 
duty of our time to note the injustice of his- 
tory and to affirm that Christianity is in full 
sympathy with that vast love of pleasure that 
fills up the mortal soul. Gloomy religion- 
ists inquire whether Christ ever laughed, and 
whether St. Paul ever joined in a dance! — as 
though there were a most withering rebuke to 
the inquiry. This we know: that history has 
never given us the picture of man in his 
home and joys and laughter and all delights, 
but only of man as swaying a scepter or as 
making a speech or writing a poem or found- 
ing a religion ; and hence you who love pleas- 
ure need not ask Josephus or Tacitus or Livy 
or Hume or Gibbon to show you a precedent; 



THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. 103 

you may cast your case upon the wisdom of a 
different Court — that of reason — or you may 
re-write history and omit the battle-field and 
the monarch, and fill your pages with common 
men, women and children, from all lands and 
all generations. Thus studying man you will 
find that the pursuit of happiness has quick- 
ened his genius and the beating of his heart 
all along his great highway, from the old 
Eden to the fresh and new America. 

Happiness thus revealing itself as a lawful 
and noble and universal pursuit, it must now be 
asked what happiness is it that is so lawful and 
noble ? It must be a happiness that does not con- 
flict with morality. Pleasure sought by a vio- 
lation of any law of health or of conscience or 
of society, is only a pain delayed. The so-called 
" daughters of joy" are the daughters of in- 
finite grief. And the appeal to the drunkard's 
glass for happiness is only placing a heavy 
mortgage upon the soul in good times to be 



104 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

paid with heavy interest when times are bad. 
The pleasure of the gambler, the betting man, 
and generally the fashionable man, is only an 
inflation of to-day at the expense of to-morrow. 
Happiness is much like money — money must 
represent an actuality. It must stand for 
some stored-up labor of individual or nation. 
If a man has earned a farm or a house or has 
digged a pot of gold ; he may issue bills of 
paper almost to the amount of value in his farm 
or house or pot of gold, but should he issue 
checks or drafts to ten times the value of his 
reality, his bills must decline to ten cents on 
the dollar so as to harmonize with his posses- 
sions. No man and no State, however power- 
ful, can create a value. No State can make 
land or make a wheat-crop. Their bills of 
exchange must represent what is. God alone 
can create. He might appeal to what might 
be. It is much thus with pleasure. Man can- 
not wander much beyond his absolute posses- 



THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. 105 

sion of power and right. An over-drinking, 
an over-eating, an over-tax of mind or body- 
is an over-issue of drafts ; and lo, on the mor- 
row, an awful depreciation of body and mind 
and soul is reported on street and change and 
in the church circles, and in that most tender 
and tearful place — the home. You see on the 
streets daily persons, male and female, who 
years ago discounted too heavily their future, 
and now the time is out. The health of the 
body and of the mind, the welfare of self and 
of society, the eternal laws of God — these are 
realities upon which all may issue their pleas- 
ure-notes, but the instant you go beyond these 
actualities you become a defaulter — you are no 
longer in the vale of pleasure, but of pain. 

It must therefore be true that what we call 
amusements are things to be regulated rather 
than sweepingly condemned. The pleasure 
of the theatre, of games, of the hunt, of the 
dance, of the dinner, of the party, of the club, 



106 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

must be one that shall not overtax health or 
morals or money, or militate against one's 
avocation. The bounding line between virtue 
and vice is not always made vividly on life's 
great plain. Our world was not made for the 
accommodation of stupid people nor for the 
growth and increase of stupidity, but to de- 
velop the intellect and the judgment. All 
college students are wont to ask, " Why study 
this Greek, with its endless details and rules 
and exceptions? Why not study easier things?" 
And the grave teachers will say in triumph, 
there is a vast amount of discipline in Greek. 
After mastering that all else will be easy. 
These Greek professors have nature on their 
side; for nature draws dim lines between vir- 
tue and vice, pleasure and pain, and then 
says: "Find these lines, oh, my children, 
and you will become as mighty men ! " The 
old church declined the task. It asked for 
easy studies. It condemned the whole region 



THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. 107 

of faint boundaries. It condemned the drama 
and the dance and the games, and even laugh- 
ter and a neat toilet, and fell back on its 
formulas as being about the only place where 
reason's trumpet could utter no uncertain 
sound. A religious Conference being unable 
to distinguish between croquet and billiards, 
did not admit billiards but they abolished 
croquet. 

And now let us come to one more general 
law about the pursuit of happiness. You per- 
ceive tens of thousands setting out from home 
at times in the pursuit of this winged butterfly. 
They go to what are called " resorts." They 
ride and they sail ; they eat and they drink, 
and they make merry. Often this is all well 
enough, and much of what they seek is found. 
But it would be a strange law of Nature if man 
must travel from home in order to find any 
important form of blessedness. Such a law 
would give pleasure to only those having some 



108 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

money, and would give it to them only in 
July and August. Nature does not fill the 
soul with an immense and universal longing 
and then bring to this longing such a small 
outcome. It has made no such failure as this, 
but on the opposite God has made happiness 
grow up around the very avocations which 
consume all our days, and around the cities or 
towns or homes which cherish us when the 
toil of the day is done. Each profession, each 
business should be also a pursuit of happiness. 
Men should so regulate their work, if possible, 
in its quantity and quality, that they will go 
to it each morning with pleasure. In all the 
ten thousand honorable pursuits the toiler in 
each industry goes cheerfully to his task, for 
his feelings have fitted themselves to it like a 
soft glove to the hand. There are men now 
in the learned professions who came up from 
a farm ; and now in looking back over the long 
stretch of years they cannot tell when they 



THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. 109 

were happiest — whether it was last year in a 
public life or in their years of student life, or 
in those former years when they were up at 
dawn in summer to get ready for plowing or 
harvesting while the grass was still glittering 
with dew. One may find pleasure by travel 
and by any form of diversion, but God has so 
made the world that the great bulk of its joy- 
fulness is to spring up around home and its 
pursuits. The heart is born into it. 

And all ye young hearts who are just enter- 
ing upon this great debate about pleasure, 
where it is to be found, do not fall into the 
error that when you become rich then you will 
try to be happy. Happiness is the most accom- 
modating of all things. It will come to a 
cottage as soon as to a palace. You need 
never wait for any outward pomp to come. 
As the sunshine of the Almighty will shine 
through a simple vine as richly as upon the 
velvet of a king or upon the gilded dome of 



110 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

a temple, so happiness falls with equal sweet- 
ness upon all whose minds are at peace and in 
whose hearts flow the good thoughts and good 
sentiments of life. Never for a moment admit 
that any millionaire or king can surpass you 
in the possession of that peace of mind and 
smile of existence which we call happiness. 
Here you are equal to the highest. 

Upon duties well done to self and mankind, 
upon health of soul and body, this depend- 
ent vine bears its weight. Pleasure is not a 
self-sustaining oak, but it is a dependent vine. 
The great vine of Santa Barbara, which bears 
tons of grapes each year, and which demands 
almost a field for its arbor, and which has a 
trunk sixteen inches in diameter, does not 
stand alone, but wanders to and fro over strong 
posts, clasping them all in its many arms. 
Happiness is thus only a dependent, climbing 
product of the soul's floral world. The many 
pursuits of man, his industry, his studies, his 



THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. Ill 

honor, his home, his philosophy, his shape of 
religion, are a long series of columns upon 
which this flowering plant hangs and relies, 
and from which it shows its blossoms and sus- 
pends its fruit. God has made man not only 
for toil but for this joy fulness. Let no yearn- 
ings for riches or for office or for a ay form of 
vain display, destroy or impede the stream of 
contentment and peace which the Creator 
designed should all the year flow through your 
soul. The fact that religion paints Heaven as 
being a happy land, is enough to point out 
the lawfulness and attractiveness of happiness; 
for what is so desirable on the shores of 
eternity must be a boon to seek and to find on 
the shores of time. 



BENEVOLENCE. 



BENEVOLENCE. 

Ont: of the most wonderful attributes of hu- 
manity is that quality in the civilized man that 
makes him desire the happiness of others. 
We call man a selfish creature. The most, 
common form of fault-finding consists in accus- 
ing the human family of acting in the name 
of only self-interest. No doubt we all come 
far short of any ideal disinterestedness, but 
after all man is the only creature on earth in 
which may be found traces of any desire to 
secure the happiness of others. In those 
noblest of animals — the elephant, the horse, 
the dog — there is no mitigation of the doctrine 
of self-esteem. These creatures will always 
attempt to take possession of the entire quan- 
tity of food to eat or water to drink that may 
(115) 



116 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

be placed before them. Instinct has always 
seen to it that the brute world shall love their 
young and care for them tenderly. The com- 
mon song-bird will begin to gather food for its 
brood by half-past three in summer mornings, 
and the curious have kept count and have 
found that the thrush will take something to 
her young ones five or six hundred times dur- 
ing the day. The moment, however, the young 
of all birds and animals have reached maturity, 
all this kindness suddenly ceases, and the bird 
which so tenderly cared for her brood last 
July, would now in December, if possible, 
steal from them the last grain of millet or wild 
rice, or the last drop of water. 

Even were it possible for the advocates of 
the development theory to show us how the 
form of the mollusk might be developed into 
the form of an ape, and afterward into a 
human outline, they would find an insurmount- 
able barrier to pass when they should attempt 



BENEVOLENCE. 117 

to explain to us how the perfect selfishness of 
brute life ever became transformed into the 
charity of manhood. There may be a resem- 
blance between the ear and eye of an animal 
and the ear and eye of a man, but all resem- 
blance passes away the moment you look into 
the mental structure of animal and man. And 
to-day we have come upon one of those attri- 
butes which declare man to be of divine quality. 
Benevolence signifies the love of others, and 
perhaps more than any other human attribute 
betrays the excellence of man at large, or of 
an age, or of an individual. 

Much of the complaint over the selfishness 
of the age, or this or that person, comes from 
the fact that there is in each mind always an 
ideal by which each one is constantly measur- 
ing the men and times around. It is essential 
to possess this ideal, for it is the pattern up 
toward which all are to work. It is th^ stand- 
ard of weight and measure which is to rule 



118 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

the human race in all its long career ; a strange 
standard, which makes itself to be higher and 
higher as men approach. Essential as this 
standard is, it has its inconvenience, for it 
makes painfully evident all the world's short- 
comings. With this ideal in our bosoms, we 
all go about measuring the selfishness of others, 
and find that there is not very much self- 
denial for the advantage of the race. To esti- 
mate the world fairly we must now and then 
fling away this crucial test — the ideal — and 
must see things in the common light of to-day 
or in the bad light of antiquity. Should a 
man come up to you with a most powerful 
magnifying glass and make a survey and de- 
clare that your skin were rough as the shell of 
an oyster, and that your hands were as large 
as spades, and that your eye were like that of 
a Cyclops, you would be justified in telling 
him that you were not made to be viewed 
through a microscope, but to be seen at a 



BENEVOLENCE. 119 

respectful distance in nature's common light. 
When a fastidious gentleman once declared 
that not more than one lady in a hundred was 
good-looking, he was most perfectly answered 
by the remark that not more than one man in 
five hundred possessed good sense ; — properly 
answered, because he had no natural right to 
subject to the fastidious ideal microscope the 
features of woman. There is a common light, 
not very strong, in which we must all walk — 
woman with her imperfect beauty and man with 
his inadequate common sense. We must love 
ideals and struggle toward them ourselves, but 
we must not use them excessively in the meas- 
urement of others. 

Viewing the human race in this moderate 
manner, we see benevolence painting its rich 
colors upon its length and breadth. Enough 
of this quality exists to show us what a divine 
virtue it is and will remain. When the phi- 
losophers began to seek a definition of the word 



120 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

" civilization," they looked into the possession 
of wealth and found that civilization did not lie 
in that form of acquisition, for lo! the Turks 
and the Spaniards of Mexico had great riches. 
They looked again and surveyed the fine arts, 
and there again they failed to find the home 
of the favorite idea, for Thebes and Babylon 
and Mnevah enjoyed the beautiful, but these 
people were semi-barbarous; the philosophers 
looked again and inquired whether this finish 
of manhood lay not in intellectual develop- 
ment, but that the Greeks and Romans pos- 
sessed, and yet they were partly savage, for 
they held slaves and put to death captives or 
infants. Driven from one position to another, 
our wise men have at last reached the conclu- 
sion that the highest culture is that which 
most wisely and tenderly seeks the happiness 
of all mankind. That is to say, that the man 
who combines the most wisdom and the most 
benevolence is the most divine man. The wis- 



BENEVOLENCE. 121 



dom delivers from all the enemies of self, and the 
benevolence makes that same wisdom the good 
fortune of others. Lord Bacon possessed vast 
learning and worldly wisdom, but was wanting 
in his relations toward mankind — and such 
was his age; and hence, it can never compare 
with that subsequent England which has more 
and more shaped the legislation for the bene- 
fit of the multitude. The true greatness of 
nation or individual begins when self, be it a 
Throne or a Man, begins to confess the pres- 
ence and need of those outside of self. 

It will probably be found true that the very 
poetry and literature of our later generations 
have become more imbued with benevolence 
than all past literature was colored with such 
a sentiment. The fading away of the epic 
poem which celebrated the military and roman- 
tic exploits of some hero, was probably caused 
by the fact that better sentiments than those of 

the warrior came along quietly but surely to 
6 



122 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

displace his figure in verse. Burns, Words- 
worth, Thompson, Cowper, and all recent 
writers of sentiment, have had more to say- 
about the rights and happiness of man than 
about the glory of war. When Cowper sang 
his familiar lines over the emancipation of 
England's slaves, he was setting to music the 
new benevolence of society. Burns was in the 
same atmosphere when he wrote most of his 
songs. So was Hood when he sang about the 
" One More Unfortunate" or the sorrows of 
the poor sewing women ; and in this path of 
sympathy with the world, most of the high 
novelists have walked in a noble group together. 
If you will look into literature you will per- 
ceive that a great change has come over it since 
it was shaped by either Homer or Dante or 
Milton. No one of these mighty masters gave 
to human feeling such a benevolent coloring 
as has been given it by all the recent years. 
All old poems abound in sublimity and fancy, 



BENEVOLENCE. 123 

but all modern poetry abounds in pathos. I 
speak of poetry because it has always been 
such a mirror of its age. As by looking upon 
the wall where a camera obscura is placed you 
can in your little room or tent mark who and 
what are passing along all the streets outside, 
so by looking into the verses of an epoch you 
may mark whether outside were battlefields 
and heroes, as around Homer ; or whether the 
church was immense, as around Dante and 
Milton ; or whether the throne and palace 
were large, as around Shakspeare. For this 
reason I call up poetry as a mirror, and look- 
ing into that of to-day I perceive that sym- 
pathy for mankind is playing a large part in 
the pageant of our country. Selfishness in- 
deed remains in the human heart, but love is 
beginning to flow over the banks of self and 
to give its Nile-like blessings to all the valley 
on either shore. 

This week upon which we now enter is 



124 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

almost wholly given up to the worship of 
benevolence. If benevolence is the love of 
others, Christmas is the day set apart for the 
worship of others. It is called a day, but that 
day consumes the half-score of days that lie 
before it. As Eastern Kings were wont to 
come to a town heralded by advance messen- 
gers, and as the messengers grew more and 
more rich in livery the nearer they were to the 
King, so this royal Christmas sends many days 
on in advance of himself; and thus, being 
indeed only one personage, he lengthens him- 
self out into a procession and impresses hun- 
dreds of hours into his happy service. All the 
last few days have worn the bright livery of her- 
alds of a King. This day, so loved, draws 
almost all its moral charm from the fact that no 
one thinks of self, but by the law of the occasion 
dreams only of the happiness of others. What 
to buy for another, what to make with one's 
own hand for another — this is the whole signifi- 



BENEVOLENCE. 125 



cance of December. In the many religions of 
the past almost all the days of the year were 
sacred to some saint or god, but it is not evident 
that any one of these days was dedicated to 
that strange shape of religion — the love of man 
for others. But at last man has added to the 
altars where he was wont to think of war or 
money or pleasure — an altar on which he 
places offerings to others. 

Year by year the love which shall come to 
this altar will enlarge its horizon. At first it 
will see only the relatives and friends of itself. 
And that is indeed a beautiful sight ; but after 
a few years or generations of this form of serv- 
ice, the heart in richness will see other chil- 
dren and persons that do not belong to its own 
fireside, and the service which began in a tent 
will swell outward until the world shall have 
become its cathedral, full of rapturous hymns 
and carols. 

There is a mysterious quality in this relation 



126 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

of each man to all men. Almost all learning 
and discovery partakes somewhat of the nature 
of benevolence. In these latter days the in- 
ventor hastens indeed to protect himself with 
patents from Government, but this is not 
simply that he may reap all the money-reward, 
but also that no other may steal from him the 
honor of having helped the people. No thinker, 
from Galileo to our Fulton and Morse, has dis- 
covered some new law or application of Na- 
ture's forces without being moved partly by 
the happiness the people would gain from the 
steamboat or the telegraph. Before such minds 
as Newton and Galileo no motive of pecuniary 
gain arose, and perhaps none before Watt or 
Fulton. They seem to have desired that the 
world should have the happiness of enjoying 
new truths and new powers. It must have been 
a moment of supreme joy when Morse found 
the daily papers for the first time publishing 
In the morning what had been said or done at 



BENEVOLENCE. 127 

cities so remote that no flying train or flying 
dove could have brought the messages. The 
reward of money must have been insignificant 
compared with that happiness which came from 
seeing the people of the great world happy 
over this winged speech. 

It shows that benevolence is the impulse of 
much of the world's science and learning — the 
ract that a long line of scholars and inventors 
march along before us in poverty. They 
spent their years in hovels or garrets, and at 
last we see them in the gray hair of age filing 
along, not with crowns on their foreheads and 
with robes trailing gracefully, but in the plain- 
est attire and perhaps marching in rags to 
that solemn retreat — the grave. But this 
large and talented host have not been without 
their reward, for as a mother finds her joy in 
the esteem shown her by her children, so lit- 
erature and invention have drawn their rewards 
from the joy they have foreseen in the eyes of 



128 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

the human race. Benevolence — the love of 
man — joins with the love of personal fame, 
and calls into being alike the astronomy of a 
Galileo and the telegraph of a Morse. I re- 
member once that a country school-master set 
me this copy: "If you and Tullia are well, 
then I also am well." It seemed the embodi- 
ment of nonsense. It seemed that the teacher 
was thinking about how to teach writing, and 
not how to make sense. It must have been 
ten years afterward that the deep meaning 
came that no heart can be well when its dear 
ones are sick, and that if the absent dear ones 
are all well, then are all three well indeed. 
Benevolence makes one well in the welfare of 
others. Thus it appears that this copy which 
seemed so empty of logic, had come down a 
journey of 2,000 years, borne along, not by 
literalism, but by the wings of benevolence. 

The question must often arise, how can tho3e 
monarchies of Europe possess such power over 



BENEVOLENCE. 129 

the common people that they love them and 
will die for them ? We perceive the fearful 
taxation and wars and confiscations of a long 
past, and yet we mark that the common people 
love all these old monarchies with a deep attach- 
ment. This state of things may be explained 
partly by the fact that man loves his native 
land, however hard his lot in its confines ; but 
the explanation comes partly from the addition- 
al fact that all monarchy has been softened by 
the greatness of its arts and parks and gardens, 
and by its full and free amusements. Much 
of the gold in the coffers of kings and queens 
and emperors has taken the form of architec- 
ture which the poor could love, of golden altars 
where the poor could kneel, of immense parks 
where the poor could wander with their neatly 
dressed children, of immense galleries where 
the people could see more beauty than even a 
king could own. Thus has benevolence come 
to counteract barbarism and despotism, just 



130 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

as May and June come at last to dissolve the 
icy chains of winter. Were it not that the 
European nations are thus softened by some 
forms of tenderness towards the people, every- 
where would come insurrection and anarchy. 
Republics must do as much for the poor by 
private generosity as kings have done for them 
by power and pride. 

You may turn aside from these large specta- 
cles of literature and invention and govern- 
ment as affected by the regard for others, and 
pass to the smaller streets of life, and behold 
this sentiment runs before us. There is not a 
ragged school or a mission school or free school 
of design, or a public library in any town or 
city that does not spring up out of this princi- 
ple. Upon the basis of religion all temples 
stand, and from this sentiment of a God all 
worship arises. From the sentiment of the 
beautiful in the soul spring five great fine arts ; 
from the perception of justice comes law; and 



BENEVOLENCE. 131 



then from a soil as rich — called benevolence — 
rise up a hundred blessed shapes of human 
welfare. In the mission schools of the church 
toil men and women who are to gather no 
money and no fame, but who discharge the 
difficult offices each Sunday from one motive 
alone — the love of something besides self. 
You may analyze their hearts to the bottom 
and you will find only one motive — the happi- 
ness of others. Man in his best estate looks 
abroad and sees his fellow man. In that hour 
he ceases to be a brute to become a soul. 

What ailed and what ails some forms of 
Christianity may be found in the • general 
absence of the love of other people. The Pro- 
testant did not throw his affection far enough. 
As soon as he came to a Romanist his heart 
congealed and he longed to capture and im- 
prison or burn the disciple of the Pope. And 
the Catholic more than equaled this limitation 
of sympathy. His love of man meant only 



132 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

Catholic men. Having found a human being 
called a Protestant, his heart became obdurate 
and the torture of the other sects became the 
chief joy of his own. The articles of faith 
drawn up in those periods were therefore 
characterized by the same absence of a broad 
good will, and the same presence of an ordeal 
of tests that took love away from the joy of 
enveloping many and made it expect the happi- 
ness of the few. Religion essayed to take God 
away from the wide world and give Him to a 
group. It tried to inclose Jehovah within the 
clasps of a Prayer Book. It made hell too 
large and heaven too small. It sat down like 
Canute by the sea- waves and bade them arrange 
their great flow to suit its chair on the beach. 
But, as the story runs, the waves came march- 
ing on. Each minute on the dial the great 
tides reaching a thousand miles outward and a 
thousand miles right and left, arose and laughed 
as it swelled upward and onward. They heard 



BENEVOLENCE. 133 



no human voice — cared for none. So the actual 
Christianity has too long attempted to limit 
the Deity and the Lord and confine them by 
lines of thought and ceremony drawn upon 
the great shore. But the tide of Divine Love 
has for a long time swept steadily inward, and 
each hour the rushing waters shall rise and 
laugh until at last the kings of old forms of 
thought will be compelled to move back and 
confess that the benevolence of religion is an 
ocean whose wave they cannot impede. Bene\*- 
olence is crowding back the arrogance of old 
masters. 

Thus among the powers that have moved 
and that shall move the human soul, let us 
place this love of others outside of self. Geol- 
ogists find that when earth first cooled after 
its primal fire it was a mass of volcanic rock. 
Our world was barren and bald as the peaks 
of Sinai ; but out of the mysterious stores of 
nature there were to come rains and frosts and 



134 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

winds and decay, and those forces were to 
assail the adamant and gradually extract from 
it a soil which should grow the maize, the 
orange and the rose. In long ages after these 
Titans had been at work the Garden of Eden 
was ready for man. In the spiritual world the 
human heart lay once like the primeval rocks ; 
but Titantic motives have beaten on that ada- 
mant and lo! at the end of each epoch of a 
thousand or ten thousand years the soil of the 
human garden has been found deeper and 
richer, and over it have bent heavier grain 
and richer flowers. Among these smiters of 
the rock, whose wand has brought forth sweeter 
waters than those which flowed when Moses 
smote the mountain in Horeb, place that love 
for others as mighty among the mighty. It 
you would measure its beauty, mark what mor- 
tals and immortals were those who have won 
their name, not by riches, not by genius, not 
by invention, not by the sword, but by the 



BENEVOLENCE. 135 

inspiration of benevolence. From the happi- 
ness of others many of the deepest thinkers 
drew their impulse and reward; hence came 
the heroism of the martyrs of a better relig- 
ion and a better liberty ; — these all wished to 
plant trees from whose branches other genera- 
tions should gather the sweeter fruit ; into this 
domain of motive, as if to point out forever its 
dignity and worth, descended Jesus Christ, 
leaving a Heaven of Joy for a world of labor, 
because the toil should be for others, not for 
self; into this motive He came ready for 
crown of thorns and for death, if only out of 
his personal griefs there might come nations 
and homes, and even tombs full of happiness 
and hope. 



RELIGION. 



VI. 

RELIGION. 

It is impossible to affix to any one of the 
considerations which influence the conduct oi 
man the title of greatest. The material world 
will submit to a measurement. Man may 
determine what mountain is highest, what 
river longest, what sea deepest, but in the 
spiritual world he must throw aside his exact 
measurements and be content with the feeling 
that all is great and mysterious. The dust of 
the universe is measurable, but not so its spirit- 
ual things. It is as though the world, intel- 
lectual and moral, were preparing us to accept 
of the infinity of a God. Were there any 
method by which we might compare together 
the leading ideas which have led the human 

family along its great journey, it would seem 
(139) 



140 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

that the motive of religion has been most 
powerful. But there is no standard or method 
of comparison here, and therefore we must 
content ourselves by declaring great among 
the powers that have moved man, is the affir- 
mation of religion. 

At some time in history that gifted being, 
man, must have begun to feel that it was somt 
more powerful being than he or than all hL 
race that had placed the sun and sta^s in the 
sky and had made such a structure as the earth. 
The Bible mentions a far-off time when men 
began to call upon the name of the Lord, and 
outside this old record, all through Egyptian 
antiquity, the mind is seen deducing from the 
encompassment of man, the fact and presence 
of a Deity. Job, one of the ancient books, 
presents in the most eloquent and logical and 
poetic of manners the argument that early 
drove society toward faith in the Creator. 
When this Chaldean Job asks: "Doth the 



RELIGION. 141 



hawk fly by thy wisdom and stretch her wings 
toward the south ? Doth the eagle mount up 
at thy command and make her nest on high ? 
Who causeth it to rain on earth where no man 
is ? — on the wilderness wherein is no man ? " 
He shows the human reason in the act of draw- 
ing near to God. The hundred or more of 
these sharp questions in that old treasure of 
literature reveal a natural theology not sur- 
passed by that of Xenophon or Lactantius or 
Paley. In the four periods represented by 
these four personages, Job, Xenophon, Lac- 
tantius and Paley — the Chaldean, Greek, Ro- 
man and English periods — we perceive the best 
forms of reason following one line of thought 
toward the one conclusion — the logical neces- 
sity of a Creator. Whether therefore man 
came to his reasoning powers at once by an in- 
stantaneous gift of his Creator, or came thither 
by a long development from a kind of infancy of 
thought, he came to a full conviction at last that 



142 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

there was a Being outside of the human race who 
was King of Kings and Lord of Lords. It 
is unknown at what time in earth's history or 
in man's history this religious sentiment sprang 
into life, but however far back our students ot 
the past go with their excavations and their 
deciphering, they cast up out of buried ruins 
or read from engraved stones or tiles, at once 
the treasures of art and of religion. Thus we 
infer that the same intellectual power which 
gave birth to a fine art gave birth also to a 
religion — that the power of logic which led 
to an architecture or an implement or a science, 
led also to a Deity, for out of the same heap 
of ruins come always emblems not only of the 
beautiful but of the religious. 

In the excavations of Babylonia George 
Smith reads from the buried tiles this psalm : 
" Oh my Lord, my transgression is great, my 
sins many. The transgression I committed I 
know not. I know not the sin I committed" 



RELIGION. 143 



— a psalm which shows us how the assumed 
holiness of a God drew tears of penitence 
from man thousands of years before David 
wrote his penitential psalm, or before the 
Church gathered these spiritual regrets into a 
miserere. But we need not delay over the 
question of the antiquity of the religious sen- 
timent. It appears as soon as the human 
mind appears. Wherever our scholars go to 
exhume some buried city, when they dig up a 
piece of writing or a fragment of the beau- 
tiful, there they dig up an image of a God and 
a verse of a psalm, as though to show us that 
where there has come the intelligence that can 
write a poem or frame a law, there has come the 
logical power to infer that man had a Creator. 

When one of our public men — public speak- 
ers I mean — was found recently at an auction 
of antiques, bidding on all the images of 
childish religions, as though he were going to 
kill Christianity by the ridicule of a new and 



144: MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

laughable pantheon, he was only purchasing 
abundant evidence that the human soul has 
always been full of a tender religious senti- 
ment, that looked up for an explanation of 
these years so full of joy and death. As it 
would not bring music into ridicule should 
the same satirist purchase at auction all the 
ram's horns that once were blown around Jer- 
ico, or all the shrill pipes of Pan, or the three 
stringed harps of Greek idlers, or the turn 
turn drums of the Indians, so should he accu- 
mulate a large assortment of fetishes and divin- 
ities, he will have made no approach toward 
any ridicule of the religious feeling in society. 
As all the noble sentiments break away from 
a childish past and rise into greatness, so 
religion will not be embarrassed by any small- 
ness of its childhood, but it will gaze steadily 
upon a dignified present and an unveiling 
future. 

Having seen the simple fact that there is in 



RELIGION. 145 



the bosom of man a religious motive, let us 
pass now to consider some of the elements of 
its power. 

A first element of the power of this motive 
may be found in that quality of mind which 
feels conscious of the rightness and wrongness 
of actions. Whether the idea was innate or 
has been acquired need not be debated here, 
but by some means man has reached a full 
conviction that there are things which he should 
not do, and things which he should do, and 
which are most noble things to do — to be done 
— and out of this inmost consciousness there 
comes a feeling that there is some Creator of 
the universe who is looking after this badness 
and goodness of mankind, to punish the one 
and reward the other. Thus this universal and 
powerful feeling of rightness and wrongness 
has been all through history, stimulating the 
motive called religion. In that legend or fact 
where Adam or Cain attempts to hide from the 



146 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

results of a sin, we see in emblem the whole 
human race attempting to conceal its bad acts 
from the eye of infinite justice. There being 
in man a sense of sin and of virtue, what is 
next demanded is some tribunal before which 
the actors must be arraigned. In our earthly 
government a law of right and wrong on the 
statute book is of no value unless there be some 
tribunal before which the case may be brought. 
It therefore comes to pass that some criminals 
fly to foreign states, that they may find, not a 
place where vice becomes a virtue, but a place 
where there is no court having power to arraign 
and condemn. There being in man a sense of 
right and wrong, religion becomes a most 
potent influence, because it announces a judg- 
ment bar before which all must stand. It com- 
pletes the theory of virtue and vice by remind- 
ing the soul that it is daily approaching a final 
rendering of its accounts. If the world had 
only laws and a Law-giver, it would be as im- 



RELIGION. 147 



perfect as would be a State, which should have 
only a statute book, and no courts, no execu- 
tive. Religion transforms the great Law- 
giver into a great judge, and lays thus the deep 
foundation of justice. 

Like all other forms of truth, this reverence 
for the Infinite Judge passed through its period 
of darkness and error. * Men attempted to 
secure blessings and pardon, and even to secure 
vengeance upon enemies by offering gifts to the 
Judge, or by binding themselves with vows 
that should cover the future, but gradually the 
intelligence of man has found regular, uniform 
laws of God, in obedience to which is happi- 
ness, in transgression of which is sorrow; but 
both these periods show us the human race 
alike as living in presence of a Judge who will 
here and hereafter, or here alone, or hereafter 
alone, make just return to the evil and the 
good. The religious motive is thus clothed 
with the powers of a final justice. 



148 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

In the workings of this great motive the 
fear of punishment has perhaps been more 
influential than the simple hope of happiness, 
but the part which the hope of acceptance with 
God and of a blessed union with him here 
and hereafter has performed is, could we see it 
all, very impressive. Man not only dreads 
pain, but he loves happiness; and therefore it 
has come to pass that countless millions in all 
times have attempted to live near to God, be- 
cause of the present and future blessedness of 
such a companionship. Regardless of any hell, 
they have loved the quality and the rewards of 
virtue. Not only the highest forms of Chris- 
tian character, but also some of the highest 
pagans have sought uprightness because of its 
moral beauty — a beauty of morals, of mind, of 
self-consciousness and peace. Borne along by 
their religion into this great discrimination 
and culture of the right, it has become to some 
a form of the beautiful. 



RELIGION. 149 



Mr. Field, the editor, who has traveled 
almost all over our earth — and with his sense 
wide open and with not a narrow sense at 
that — said recently that he had found in 
pagan lands where our Christianity was un- 
known, some most charming souls who loved 
virtue and piety as much as child ever 
loved a flower. Having letters of introduc- 
tion to a local prince, the prince sent word 
to Mr. Field that on the morrow he would 
be at his service, but that day just passing, 
he was keeping in communion with his 
God. With the sun of the next morning 
the venerable pagan came along with richly 
caparisoned elephants for his Christian guests. 
But the beauty of the story is yet to come, 
for Mr. Field soon found himself in the 
palace of a man against whom no poor man 
or poor woman could bring any charge of 
any form of dishonor out of his long past. 
The neighborhood looking to him for a 



150 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

half century could see only the beauty of 
goodness. 

It must have been out of this study of God 
as the emblem of virtue and of its happiness, 
that those pagan wise men of India framed 
their rebuke to the British sporting officers, 
expressed in these lines : " You Christians 
must have a strange religion ; for in our divine 
philosophy the death of a bird may be a neces- 
sity, but it can never be a pleasure." If now 
within the twilight of a pagan faith, the soul 
can extract such high views and such a spirit- 
ual joy from contemplating the piety and 
tenderness of the Deity, what may not this 
religious motive become when guided and in- 
flamed by the holier light issuing from the 
pages of our divine books? In our era the 
standard of goodness found in the New Testa- 
ment, unveiling as it does the true God, marks 
the uprising of a new power to sway the soul, 
a power which like a sea can carry upon its 



RELIGION. 151 



wide bosom a vast army of soldiers of a higher 
life — not armadas of cruel troops, but of kind 
and enlightened men. 

Next to this element of right and wrong, as 
developed by the standard of a God, must be 
reckoned the influence of all that mystery 
which is grouped under the general name of 
religion. All have been deeply affected by 
these questions of final destiny, and as they 
are made the special study of religion, they 
must be considered as a part of its powerful 
motive. Science declines the inquiry about 
heaven and hell and immortal life. It confes- 
ses, perhaps humbly, perhaps sarcastically, 
that its study terminates with the dissolution 
of the body — that it has no crucible, nor 
balances, nor spectrum with which to examine 
a soul. Politics says nothing about any em- 
pire beyond the tomb. Even the divinely 
called Moses himself when he was writing 
down the laws of his society on a mountain, 



152 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

smoking and hot with justice, made no allusion 
to any land beyond Canaan, any life beyond 
this, and this severity of the State returns in 
our day to exclude from legislation the name 
of a God. More and more mankind commits 
to religion all this great argument and great 
conjecture over things beyond the coffin of our 
dust. Thus religion stands alone as a vase full 
of mysteries — those black and white flowers 
of the sepulchre. 

Of all the solemnities of which the mind 
can conceive, death is the greatest. Even 
when not the King of terrors it is at least the 
King of mysteries. Should we know that a 
man were to be put to death in our city at a 
certain hour to-morrow, almost all hearts would 
beat strangely out of measure in that moment. 
Business would pause in all the streets in the 
one minute of such a public and fixed death. 
As when a piano string is struck, all metals 
in the room that are in harmony vibrate in 



RELIGION. 153 



companionship, so were a murderer doomed to 
die in a public square at a fixed, moment, a 
half million hearts would beat in the agony, 
not from any unison of crime, but from a 
fellowship in death's awful mystery. Men 
walk softly when they walk among graves. 
Those of you who, in former years have walked 
through a country churchyard, where the 
house of prayer always stands amid the white 
stones of loving memory, can remember still 
with what guarded foot and guarded voice you 
went from willow to willow, or from slab to 
slab in the June grass. You needed no book 
of etiquette to remind you that you had found 
a place where the foot must not be in haste, 
nor be rude, and where there should be a more 
quiet tone of voice, and where speech should 
wish to give place to meditation. It is not to 
be wondered at that the sweetest of poems 
came to Gray when he was thus moved or 
rested among the Churchyard yewtrees. Now 



154: MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

this sentiment which so possesses the heart in 
these peculiar moments spreads all over life, 
and there are perhaps few days when the music 
of being is not strangely intermingled with 
that more solemn strain rising up from the 
vale of death. There may be here and there 
an empty heart and a thoughtless brain across 
which no churchyard meditation passes for 
months or years together ; but these are excep- 
tional and leave unaffected the truth that no 
one reflection comes to man with such unifor- 
mity and power as the thought that in a few 
years we shall all be far away. This is the 
thought that fills the churches on the holy days, 
and which makes those who differ in creed 
and those who hold no creed join willingly in 
one hymn, because all hearts are one in this 
religious mystery. A common grave creates 
a common religion. 

Our deepest thinkers have shown us how 
climate and the formation of the ground affect 



RELIGION. 155 



character. They find a certain cuiture coming 
out of Scotland's hills, and France's sunshine, 
and out of Egypt's mild sky and dreamy air ; 
they tell us that that dry climate of the desert 
invited Egypt to dream of no decay of art or 
soul; they tell us that the Southern zones 
repress thought, and that the North redoubles 
it, that earthquakes develop cowards, that war 
makes heroes ; that the intellect was made dull 
in the " thick air of Bceotia," and they find 
the varying influence of food and pursuits and 
institutions ; they show us that home and 
democracy came issuing from the Feudal house 
where a lord began to detract from a king, and 
where the fireside became a school, a cottage 
and a church ; but after we had gathered up 
and have measured all these hands that have 
shaped the soul's clay, we shall find them all 
surpassed by tracings made upon our urns of 
life by the heavy and strange hand of death. 
It has toiled in all times and climates. Alike 



156 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

in South and North, among Scotland's moun- 
tains or in Egyptian plains, this form of 
thought has played by day and night. It 
intruded itself upon a Saint Paul or a Caesar ; 
it came to terrify a Herod, to inspire a St. 
John. No spring or autumn can equal eter- 
nity in touching the heart. 

Carrying in our bosoms such a motive as re- 
ligion, it remains to inquire what kind of a 
religion should we ask to come in and move us 
onward in this life-march. Will any shape of 
it answer as well as any other ? There being 
many forms of this sentiment and philosophy, 
it would be an amazing state of affairs should 
they all be of equal value. Compare together 
the belief of the Red-man and the belief of the 
Quaker and what a difference of intrinsic worth ! 
The former is a cruel and childish superstition 
in part, the latter is a strange combination of 
piety and the highest utility. Thus the world's 
religions rise up before us in an infinite variety 



RELIGION. 157 



of shapes, as varying as the wild animals that 
come in from the forest or the jungle or the 
desert. Having assumed that the soul must 
live and die in a religion, it becomes a most im- 
portant inquiry what shall be the form of my 
so-called piety? What quality must this motive 
assume? On what kind of a branch must this 
chameleon lie ? The world mentions " that this 
and that number got religion last winter," but 
tells us not what shape of it they thus secured. 
When the old Catholics "got religion" they 
hasted out and put to death a multitude of 
fellow-men ; and when our Protestant ancestors 
" got religion" they too went forth to exterm- 
inate all who tasted their Saviour in a wafer or 
who said their prayers before the beaming eyes 
of the Virgin. Looking into this past, it 
becomes evident that at the very moment of 
getting religion the mind should know what 
religion it has received or is about to accept. 
This rule will be a good one, that the broader 



158 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

and truer and grander the motive which fills 
and sways the soul the greater at last will be 
the soul! For the soul, like Moore's vase, is 
perfumed by the roses it carries. We are 
educated by these motives that lie in the heart. 
All these motives mentioned — knowledge, 
home, honor, benevolence and happiness — are 
educators of the inmost man. And as home is 
better to the degree of its peace and comfort 
and knowledge, to the degree of its quality, so 
religion must be a choice and select religion, 
that it may bear the soul aloft on its blessed 
wings. 

The seeker of this piety may join himself 
to almost any one of the modern sects. While 
all may believe that all Jews who are faithful 
to their Deism are children of the Christian's 
God, and that devout, faithful pagans will join 
with the saints of all ages in a great harmony 
beyond this world, yet we find in the Christian 
Church the ideal service of our heavenly 



RELIGION. 159 



Father. It is the one among ten thousand, 
and in its leading head, Christ, it is spotless. 
The Church breaking up into many streams, 
like the river which flowed through Eden, 
offers sweet waters in any part of its divided 
wave. The seeker of this religion may enter 
any sanctuary, provided he can do so with the 
open-hearted confessions that the other gates 
will open for others to the same blessings here 
and hereafter. One may join a sect if he will 
not make that little confine the motive of his 
days and years. One may make of a sect a 
convenience, an aid, a staff of his long march, 
but all the while he must love more that vast 
Church of the Almighty of which temple the 
sects are separate stones, and toward whose por- 
tals the little creed is a staff to make firm the 
slow and uncertain footsteps. 

"We may love our garden and home tenderly, 
but we must not trample down the field of 
another; but each morning when the dew hangs 



160 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

upon our vines we must confess that it glistens 
as well in the parks of our neighbors, and 
sparkled before we were born, and will be full 
of sunbeams after we are dead. 

All denominations invite, and all are good, 
but you must never attempt to see the ocean in 
a cup, when its great self lies only a few steps 
away moving in all its magnificence. Fling 
aside the cup, for a few paces will bring you to 
that Christ where charity and righteousness 
expand like the fields of the heavens. 

The religion which should in these days 
come to move men should, besides being one of 
boundless good will, be one of inflexible integ- 
rity. The world is not vexed by voluminous 
creeds, except only so far as they have diverted 
the church from the study of character and 
action. The world has often found men dis- 
honest, and little and cruel, who yet could re- 
cite a hundred articles that make up a salvation. 
The impression has gained ground that in some 



RELIGION. 161 

way this intellectual work has turned the 
church aside from a broad humanity and from 
a study of the actions of Christ. All things, 
the pressure of reason, the disappointment of 
society over the results of a complex faith, the 
demand for noble men and women, the natural 
tendency of intellect toward simplicity, require 
that he who " gets religion " in these years, 
should secure one that shall stand close by the 
simplicity and broadness and Tightness of the 
central Christ. 

Such a religion in the end will be a motive 
of life and action which nothing can surpass. 
Instead of contracting the mind, as Christian- 
ity in the past has done again and again, it 
will enlarge the heart into its own large pro- 
portions. Before its benignant eyes the world 
will lie to be taught, to be aided, to be forgiven, 
but not to be hated. And the broader a faith 
is the more imperishable. It is the local that 

dies. This made Moses perish and his cere- 

7* 



162 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

mony. Popes and kings and thinkers and 
soldiers, have been destroyed because they 
loved the ideas of a day, but Christ is as pow- 
erful in the nineteenth century as he was in 
the first, because His principles were as broad 
as all centuries. The human family cannot 
outlive them nor migrate beyond them. May 
the religious ideas and impulses which shall 
influence you all, be those which shall possess 
an infinite charity and an imperishable truth. 



BEAUTY. 



VII. 

BEAUTY. 

One of the most marvelous qualities in man 
must be confessed to be the obligation that 
compels him to make out of the world's beauty 
a motive of life. He is commanded by his 
nature to place a high value upon what is, 
when analyzed, only an ornamentation. 
Philosophy attends man when he seeks food, 
drink, clothing, shelter, education, institu- 
tions and laws ; but when the same man 
turns aside from these essential paths and 
plucks a flower or puts a red feather in his 
hat or makes a robe of many colors philoso- 
phy steps back amazed and asks why he 
should be guilty of such conduct. Jacob 
made for his favorite son a coat of many 
colors. Philosonhy can see a reason for the 

(165) 



166 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

coat, but it finds no explanation of the colors. 
It fails, also, to perceive why the brethren of 
Joseph should have been offended at the gor- 
geousness of the raiment, because all the 
merit of the garment lay in the fact and 
goodness of the coat — the colors, however 
many or bright, not being able to enter into 
the data of pure thought. The coat was a 
ground of envy so far as it was comfortable 
in cold days, but the appearance of the goods 
could in reason have weighed nothing for or 
against the emotion of envy. 

It is singular that the only animal that can 
reason is also the only animal that greatly 
cares for something for which no reason can 
bb assigned. Man is the only creature that 
reasons ; he is also the only animal that loves 
beauty, but he can not assign a reason for his 
passion. The beaver builds a house, but he 
aims only at comfort. There are no marble 
columns and no Gothic openings in the 



BEAUTY. 167 



beaver's home. The bee makes an elegant 
honey-comb, but the skull of a dead lion, a 
hollow in a tree, makes as good a hive for the 
nectar as the little laborer desires. It asks 
no help from beauty. When the sparrow 
builds its nest no effort is made to have the 
materials match in quality or cost or color. 
A ribbon and a cotton string keep company ? 
and long straws and threads hang and nutter 
in the wind. The one idea of utility prevails 
and after that comes chaos. But when we 
come to the reasoner — man — we find him 
hotly pursuing all his life an end for which 
he can not assign a cause. No sooner has he 
reached the idea of house than he rears stone 
columns in front. Later on his children have 
fluted the columns. Afterward his descend- 
ants polish the shafts. Then follow decora- 
tions until the Church of St. Peter's, which 
cost fifty million dollars, must be composed of 
ten million dollars for the house-idea proper 



168 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

and forty million dollars for the decorations. 
In the modern home which costs one hundred 
thousand dollars perhaps one-fourth the sum 
is spent at the bidding of beauty alone. 

Beauty rises up as a costly sentiment. Com- 
pared with the outlay for beauty, wars and 
distilled drinks come cheaply. From the 
baby's wagon to the old man's coffin money 
flows along this one channel. Many a bouquet 
of roses held in a girl's hand for an evening 
cost as much as a farm cost in these rich prai- 
ries when we were young. Costly or cheap, 
beauty is inexplicable. When the great 
Greek statesmen and scholars assembled to 
hear an essay, or for a wise talk, they put 
wreathes of leaves about their foreheads. 
Why did they do this? Did the wreathes 
add anything to the wisdom of the sympo- 
sium? Reason is silent. Reason can not 
fathom the ocean of beauty. It walks to and 
fro, amazed, upon that shore. 



BEAUTY. 169 



If the rational powers can not point out a 
reason for this human chase, why does not 
man abandon the pursuit ? This abandoning 
has been tried, and it has failed to make the 
gain as great as the loss. The old aphorism 
used to say: "It will cost something to be 
religious ; it will cost more not to be so." The 
words can now be spoken over this kindred 
sentiment : " It will cost something to love 
the beautiful; it will cost more not to do so." 
In India, where the fakirs have made all orna- 
ment a sin, where to eat, to drink, to breathe 
in the cheapest manner are the aims of being, 
the soul finds its lowest depths. In many 
corners of London and Paris, and in all great 
cities, all beauty is absent from home, dress, 
conduct and language; but instead of justify- 
ing these scenes the human race demands that 
money be flung into those dens of ugliness 
until some of the world's sweetness may be- 
come visible. For reasons unknown to man 



170 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

beauty is an immense power. All the marble 
columns that have tottered and fallen, all the 
statues exhumed, all the jingling verses that 
have come down to us from the past, tell us. 
that human power once held sway in those 
fields of columns and song. All past beauty 
is the evidence of past greatness. 

The words of Solomon that God hath made 
everything beautiful in its time do not carry 
the reason with them ; nor have the centuries 
that have passed since they were uttered made 
amends for the old absence of adequate cause, 
but humanity has not waited for a good argu- 
ment ; it has rushed into the fields and gath- 
ered the roses; it has stood in delight where 
the singing birds could be heard or the sunset 
colors seen. The fact that this sense is an 
instinct does not remove it from the presence 
of reason, for self-preservation is an instinct, 
but reason tells man why he should live and 
protect his life. To many an instinct logic 



BEAUTY. 171 



comes and points out the reason of its being, 
but no logic has ever told man why he should 
love a marble column, and be partial to cer- 
tain eight notes of sound 

By thought and studied justice, the supreme 
courts may cease to be respecters of persons, 
and may decide for a white man or a black 
man with no element of prejudice, but when 
the millions of sounds stand before the bar 
of judgment eight sounds always are elected 
as favorites, and all the residue are ordered 
back and away. Thus, along with the eight 
notes, other points and facts come up to be 
elected into this eternal life. The world's 
millions say: "We love you, come with us," 
and onward goes humanity with its singular 
sentimental companion, but no reason is as- 
signed. 

So influential has this companion always 
been, so powerful to exact labor, wealth and 
solicitude, so powerful to mold the character 



172 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

of mankind, that beauty must be confessed to 
be one of the greatest motives of life. It must 
take its place along with learning, skill, wealth, 
duty and piety as a reason why man came to 
this world and should wish to remain. Is life 
valuable? The answer must come not only 
from the considerations of self-culture and 
personal progress, not only from the duty one 
owes to his home and his country, but a part 
of the answer should come from the beauty of 
the world in which this life is passing along. 
The earth was made to be a great retainer. It 
pays much and promises much to all who will 
espouse its cause. What detentions its beauty 
weaves for man ! Each approaching spring- 
time asks the heart to stay and see the leaves 
unfold once more. The summer says, Wait 
and see all my magnificence once again. And 
when the autumn is drawing near the heart 
becomes full of anxiety to see the colored 
leaves or hear their rustle under foot out in 



BEAUTY. 173 



the October woods. Unless the body is full 
of pain or the mind of misfortune, each hour 
of the day possesses some charm that weaves 
a reason why the heart should not quit the 
scene ; and even to the dying the beauty of 
the world makes a final appeal, and makes a 
Mozart wish to hear music once more, and 
makes the sinking Goethe ask that the cur- 
tain be drawn aside that he may once more 
see the sun's great flood of light. When God 
placed man upon this planet, He took care 
that the new occupant should not hasten to 
get away, that each violet and lily of the field 
should become a detention, a retainer's fee to 
the heart. When reason can not persuade 
the mind, then beauty can. 

It must be, indeed, that the reason of the 
human race upon the earth is to be found in 
certain great works of utility which man is to 
perform ; but it is also evident that the children 
of God were formed for happiness, and that 



174 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

much of this happiness was to come from that 
one sentiment which can transform a sound or 
a scene into a delight. Whatever peace of 
conscience and sense of duty done the soul 
may possess, it still asks for more of happi- 
ness, and appeals to nature and all the fine 
arts to add to its blessings. Has the day's 
work been well done ? Has the hand bestowed 
some charity? Has some home been made 
happier? Then says this heart which has 
acted most nobly : " I should love now to walk 
in the garden or the woods or hear a song." 
A good conscience is never happiness enough 
of itself; it asks help from the empire of 
nature and art. Instead of being in itself ade- 
quate, moral peace only clothes external beauty 
with more power and redoubles the wealth of 
a sentiment to a soul that seems least to need 
it. Instead of drawing happiness from a clear 
conscience, the man having such a sense of 
righteousness hastens at once to extract joy 



BEAUTY. 175 



from some other source. The mind does not 
love to feed upon itself. This will be egotism. 
In its good hours of charity or patriotism or 
justice it turns from self and asks the fields, 
the hills, the sky to come to its help. It can 
contemplate the charms of the world, but not 
the merit of itself. Thus born to be a seeker 
of happiness, man was not to find his happi- 
ness in his virtue alone, but his virtue itself 
was ordained to fall back upon a beautiful 
world. 

It must be that the qualities of the mind 
being the same in two persons, the one who 
lives the nobler life will extract the more 
happiness, not only from self but from the 
phenomena of beauty. To men guilty of 
cruel murder mistaken sympathy often car- 
ries flowers. Worthless offerings all those! 
for minds that could for months plan the 
murder of a brother, that could allure him 
to a lonely place and strike him down in an 



176 MO TIVE8 OF LIFE. 

instant, and thus end a beautiful world to 
another soul, are not minds that possess 
enough of divine or human peace to make 
beauty possible to their hearts. To all such 
persons, in any place or age, earth should 
offer nothing but a prison or a forfeiture of 
life. They touch the planet only to mar it. 
They arrest the plan of a world in which 
God made each thing beautiful in its time. 

It is possible, could all the facts be known, 
that, all other things being equal, beauty 
stands forth more plainly revealed to the 
honorable than to the wicked. The poet 
Burns spoke of sins that petrified the feel- 
ings. As that glass or metal must be highly 
polished that will give back the image of 
any object placed before it, so that heart 
must possess a calm surface which would 
make full answer when the rose blooms 
before it or the robin sings. Robbers can 
live in a cave because their home needs no 



BEAUTY. 177 



ornamentation. Their hearts can not be a 
mirror of nature. Aside from the inquiry 
about the relations of beauty to morals, the 
sentiment remains as a most powerful motive 
of human existence. What an army of mor- 
tals of all ages and conditions will set forth 
soon for what is called their summer diversion! 
As property and education grow in volume, 
this army grows in multitude. A part of 
the throng travel forth for unworthy pur- 
poses, some to attend gaming resorts, some 
to find haunts of the most extreme and the 
most foolish fashions, but it is comforting 
to think that the majority will move forth 
that they may be in the presence of what is 
sublimest or sweetest in the scenery of our 
little star. These many minds separate at 
the start and choose many paths, but each 
path will be found leading to a mountain 
range East or West, or to an ocean or a fra- 
grant pine forest, or leading further away to 



178 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

where glacier or midnight sun or an Arctic 
summer can smite the mysterious strings of 
the heart. 

Many of the Arctic expeditions came from 
the love of beauty concealed under the name 
of science. When Sir John Franklin was a 
youth, he walked twelve miles upon a holi- 
day that he might see the ocean. He re- 
versed the sentence of Csesar. He went, he 
saw, he was conquered. The land lost all 
charms. He fell in love with the sea. When 
only sixteen he is seen fighting with Lord 
Nelson in the battle of the Baltic; when 
twenty he is far away in the awful battle of 
Trafalgar ; when six years more has passed 
he is seen sailing in the Gulf of Mexico to 
attack the city of New Orleans. His first 
wife was a poetess ; his second wife a heroine 
in spirit. This was the kind of science that 
lay under the Arctic voyage. Under the 
expedition of Elisha Kent Kane lay the 



BEAUTY. 179 



same demands of a highly poetic nature, and 
when one reads the later voyage of the Jean- 
nette, one finds that a large part of the 
science consists in finding how near flowers 
will bloom to a band of snow and how soon a 
long, almost nightless, day can cover the 
frozen zone with rich verdure. As under 
the ancient Argonaut expedition lay the 
alluring beauty of the Golden Fleece, so 
under much of modern sailing and excavat- 
ing lies the same motive, and the beauty 
which stands associated with morals stands 
also as an inspiration of science. 

As in the sailing ships of Franklin, Kane, 
and old Jason, the motive of beauty is seen, 
thus it enters into the isolated minds which 
are soon to look outward for some reward 
from the external world. Whether the favor 
demanded is permission to move among the 
works of art or the ruins of the classic period, 
or only to revisit the home, the orchard made 



180 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 



clear by childhood, or only to pass out of the 
noise and struggle of the city, the demands 
all come from this one and the same passion 
of the human race 

It has been estimated that certain millions 
of dollars will be given to Europe this sum- 
mer by American wanderers. Other millions 
will be spent by American tourists or resting 
ones in their own land. Only two grounds 
of lament are visible — the one that this 
money could not be spent by a greater num- 
ber of persons ; the other, that some of those 
millions of dollars will not be spent in the 
pursuit of real beauty. But after these two 
regrets have been expressed it will remain 
true that the search for real wonders and 
splendors is a pursuit that merits the spend- 
ing of much gold. The pursuit must be 
reckoned a part of that education which 
fashions mankind, and the Nation which 
spends one hundred millions a year in its 



BEAUTY. 181 



free schools for the children must be expected 
to spend gold for the higher culture of its 
adult citizens. To the little child a school 
book is essential, but to the adult mind there 
are few books that can compare with the 
planet earth and the space in which it floats. 
One of the merits of early education is found 
in its enabling the mind to study and com- 
prehend its world. The book on astronomy 
is able to make the midnight sky greater in 
all after years ; the books on language and of 
language help the mind rise to the creation 
and expression of the soul's best possible 
emotions. A large part of the money thus 
spent each summer is poured out in the 
name of human culture and a high happi- 
ness, and once deemed by the ascetics a great 
waste, it must now be estimated as spent in 
the name of a most lawful motive of life. In 
the divine book we are taught that man is 
something more than food, drink, and rai- 



182 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

merit, that he is also an intellectual and 
spiritual being; and, if so, it need not be 
wondered at if often his mind and spirit cost 
him much more than his clothes. It 
would be confessed a wonderful reform if the 
poor and the wage-earners of the great cities 
should spend for some kind of beauty what 
they spend for ruinous drink. Of course 
the essentials of life would offer to them a 
better object than beauty, but the money 
spent for strong drink stands almost alone in 
its inability to add anything to either the 
clothes or the soul. 

That Solomon who so long ago sounded the 
praises of this sentiment added a qualifying 
clause, the neglect of which is the error and 
sin of all generations. "All things beautiful 
in their time," means all things in their 
proper quantity and proper place. Having 
found that he may live for mountains, oceans, 
flowers, music and all art, man is compelled 



BEAUTY. 183 



to inquire how much of life he may offer at 
these shrines? No rule can be given. It is 
certain that the problem of quantity must 
always be in waiting before the judgment. 
The lady may desire to have a tuberose in the 
room, but she does not desire to have a thou- 
sand of those fragrant cups. Incense may be 
burned at some hour, but for many hours the 
air from heaven is better without any touch 
of rose or sandal- wood. A shower of rain 
can better sweeten it. 

Philosophers find two difficulties in nature 
— the one is, how to start a motion, the 
the other is, how to stop it. When it was 
proposed first to run railway trains rapidly, 
Chancellor Livingston said they could not 
displace the canal, because a rapid train could 
not be stopped at a given, exact point for 
receiving and discharging passengers and 
freight. Thus, all through nature and life, 
reappear the twin problems of starting a 



1 84 M0T1 VES OF LIFE. 

power and of bringing it to rest. In the 
railway department our age has triumphed, 
but having put into motion this enormous 
force of beauty, few are the individuals who 
can wave the hand and bring it to a halt. 
Christ loved the lilies and the sparrows, and, 
no doubt, more deeply still the home and 
hills of Bethlehem, but he could in any 
moment pass over to the world of work and 
sorrow. But many of his disciples start after 
the lilies and can never come back, never 
look to the right nor left afterward. They 
forget that a railway train would be of no 
value if it could never be stopped. The 
difficulty with balloon travel lies in the un- 
certainty of the route the voyager will take 
or where he will land. Thus our age may 
make of its aesthetics a balloon which will 
carry it whither it should not go, and let it 
fail in the sea or some desert. There was 
once a classic people which thus was borne 



BEAUTY. 185 



aloft, but when they came down they were in 
the camp of Rome, with Goth and Vandal 
also not far away. 

History and biography more than intimate 
that the sentiment of the beautiful must be 
forever under the eye of reason, because the 
moment its work passes out of a certain con- 
fine it becomes a deformity. As in literature, 
a thought will bear well some delicate decora- 
tion, but will be ruined if it is made to wear 
a whole wardrobe of adjectives, thus in all the 
days and scenes of a human life there must 
be a perpetual discrimination as to what is 
called pleasure, because that which is beauti- 
ful is such only in its time. That rose easily 
fades. 

In this kingdom wealth and moderate 
means are both one. The land of beauty is 
more democratic than any political republic. 
To the John Franklin who walked twelve 
miles to the sea it was as sublime as it ever 



1 86 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

has been to any one who has approached it in 
a chariot. When the tourists meet in the 
valley of the Yosemite there is one grandeur 
to the man worth millions and to the school- 
teacher who has traveled on half-fare. And 
when pathetic music plays, the tears do not 
fall according to wealth or titles but accord- 
ing to the hearer's heart. There is one 
beauty for king and subject, mistress and 
maid. 

Up from the tremendous fact of a senti- 
ment rise some inferences of no little worth. 
God having Himself possessed the sentiment, 
and having made a beautiful world, man 
being granted the same taste, he is impelled 
by it to create a second universe ; his own 
lesser world of art, and thus is man made a 
worker and a creator. He is not an animal 
simply, using a world; he is also a creator, 
able to amplify the God-made home, To 
follow his God secures him an infinite task. 



BEAUTY. 187 



It may also be inferred that man was not 
evolved from spontaneous life, for although 
use, utility, and the survival of the fittest 
might explain the needful organs and imple- 
ments of the animal realm, they can not 
explain why man should be anxious to see a 
cataract or a mountain or an orange grove in 
bloom. The sentiment of the beautiful takes 
man away from the shop of chemical evolu- 
tion and hands him over to some origin full 
of love and thought. 

Inasmuch as this physical beauty of earth 
is always pointing toward what is called 
spiritual charm ; as the lilies of Judea were 
only material images of Christ himself; as 
some characters are said to be white as snow ; 
as each heighth of mountain stands for some 
heigh th of mind, and each broad sea recalls 
some breadth of soul, thus may it be that this 
whole life is a material forerunner of some- 
thing more spiritual and higher, and that all 



188 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

the beauties upon earth are so many promises 
of something more infinite and more lasting 
in some other sphere. To no one has this 
emotion reached an end and perfection in this 
world. Noble as our world is, it has always 
been to even its best minds only a suggestion. 
It has never been a fulfillment, but only a 
divine prophesy. We have all come into a 
world where Christ died. Shall we ever 
come to a world in which Christ lives ? for 
the life of Christ and man is more beautiful 
than their death. 






THE CHRIST-MOTIVE 



VIII. 

THE CHRIST MOTIVE. 

Each age manufactures for itself terms of 
new import though not always of new form. 
The painters have taken up the word " feel- 
ing," and have made it do a new kind of 
duty in expressing the purpose of the artist 
and the sentiment of the spectator. The 
word " motive " has also been enlarged by the 
musicians, and now stands for the kind of 
emotions which the musician and his auditor 
should experience in their many relations to 
the varied language of sounds. When one 
has listened long to these terms, as used by 
the devotees of art, one may well ask if a 
similar devotion might not find in religion 
such a fact as the Christ-motive. Why not ? 
In the Wagnerian music the great composer 

(191) 



192 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

assumes that certain tones and a certain move- 
ment will better awaken the idea of fire, or of 
war, or defeat, than other tones would awaken 
the special emotion. The tones which are 
specially fitted for a given result are called 
a " motive." They move all minds in the 
one direction, It is probable that were the 
religious world as industrious and deep as the 
students of art, it would find a use for the 
term Christ-motive — a potency contained in 
Him alone. 

In essence, the Nazarene differs so widely 
from the influential names of both ancient 
and modern times that he would seem to de- 
mand and merit the distinction of being a 
special momentum for all looking or listening 
hearts. If a composer was able to devise a 
special kind of music that should always 
awaken the thought of spears, or giants, or 
love, or hate, with what kind of tones would 
that master have expressed the coming of 



THE CHRIST -MOTIVE. 193 

Christ out of the wilderness and his entering 
upon the task of living and dying for the 
human race? Evidently, Christ lived out a 
phase of life that had been unusual ; and its 
originality was no greater than its sublimity. 
It was so far removed from the pictures given 
to society by the military chieftains, the 
scholars, and kings, that it could express 
itself only by making use of the name of the 
being who lived it. The follower of Christ 
was called a Christian, so far removed was he 
from the likeness of all his neighbors. When 
Pliny and Tacitus alluded to the Christians, 
they could point out several particulars in 
which those disciples of the new Leader 
differed from all the common millions under 
the Roman flag. The image was not beauti- 
ful to those Pagan writers, but it was unique. 
Our age could, should it make the effort, 
read the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth better 
than it was read by the Jews around him ; 



194 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

better than it was read by Thomas a'Kempis, 
who spent his life in writing and acting 
"The Imitation of Christ." Time is a great 
light bearer. Modern statesmen can see lib- 
erty and education and industry more clearly 
than their ancestors saw those entities. As 
the steam engine is more appreciated to-day 
than it was in its first years, so all truths and 
personages unfold in long time. That process 
of ripening which is seen in the fields of 
fruits and grains is seen in the spiritual world 
as well, and, therefore, it should not surprise 
us if Christ is more clearly seen by the 
nineteenth century than he was seen by the 
first. 

The time required for the ripening of a 
truth depends upon the quality of the truth 
which waits for recognition. If it comes in 
opposition to many ideas and persons that 
have long held power among men, it must 
move slowly. As a steam vessel, sailing 



THE CHRIST -MOTIVE. 195 

among icebergs or in a harbor full of other 
ships, must run at quarter speed, because it 
must wait for so many obstacles to be removed 
from the way and for so many signals to be 
given and to be answered, so, when a new idea 
is launched, it can not at once move forward 
with full power because its sea is not open, 
but, rather, is it exceedingly full of small and 
great craft. The obstacles to a scientific 
thought have been, generally, great enough to 
be discouraging, but they stand dwarfed by 
the obstacles which lie in the path of a moral 
proposition. The telegraph and railway 
came slowly, indeed, but they almost ran 
when compared with the creeping speed at 
which freedom came to mankind. It took the 
telegraph a third of a century to win any 
favor, but it takes hundreds of years for an 
England to fling aside her crown. She is 
gradually removing it from her brow. While 



196 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

that crown is moving a half inch science 
travels a hundred miles. 

The coming of Christ was not the advent 
of a scientific truth, but it was the effort of a 
new moral philosophy to enter and pervade 
a world. It was difficult for those then liv- 
ing, to know what such a character as Jesus 
could possibly mean. To admit him was to 
reject much. 

When it was proposed that the earth was a 
round body, the idea was received with 
laughter, for, said the laughing public, 
if the world were round and in motion, 
the objects would fall off as the ball should 
turn. The idea of a globular earth, made 
a change necessary in other ideas; as to 
what held objects to even the upper surface 
of the earth. Thus to admit a new truth 
was to admit a score of cognate notions, 
and to destroy as many of those which 
had long prevailed among men. Thus for 



THE CHRIST- MOTIVE. 197 

Christ to come was for many other persons 
to go away. He came into conflict with 
many rules, beliefs and customs. 

From the smallness of the multitude which 
Pilate found for Christ in the final hour 
of trial and condemnation, it is to be in- 
ferred that the points of conflict between 
the Nazarene and the Roman Age were 
very numerous and grave. Many points 
have, no doubt, fallen out of history, or 
rather failed ever to get into its embalmment. 
As we cannot now travel back the little 
distance, and find all the reasons why 
Elizabeth should have executed the Queen 
of Scots, or why Henry VIII should have 
felt murder to be such a family necessity, 
cannot travel back the long distance and 
see why Athens did not find ample room 
for Socrates in her streets, thus are we 
unable to find all the objections which 
Rome and Judea raised to the character 



198 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

and works of such a personage as the Son 
of Man. The ill-repute of a Nazarene, 
the simplicity of Christ's toilet, his spirit 
of equality, his kindness to children, his 
high morality, his attachment to God, his 
hope of Heaven, his very gentleness, may 
all be combined with a group of allegations 
now wholly lost, to make the populace 
hurry him away to the cross. History 
was not written then as it is written now. 
Only the greatest lives were noted down 
with any fulness. Compared with the life 
of modern statesmen, the biography of even 
Julius Csesar is only a dim shadow of a 
passing greatness. From such a period the 
life of Christ comes to us with many 
a chapter left out. Only a line is d'rawn 
where the world would now love to see a 
whole forehead with all its color and all 
its lines of care. The whole scene is cast 



THE CHRIST -MOTIVE. 199 

in deep shadow, in which valuable details, 
beautiful or sad, are forever lost. 

For the purpose of illustration, let us 
assume that Jesus came into conflict with 
his age at a full score of points. It would 
then be logical to assume that half of those 
points were so local and transient as never 
to enter into history. There may have 
been personal ill-will toward Christ, cher- 
ished by men whose sins he had rebuked, 
or whose popularity he had lessened. Herod 
carried a personal dislike to John; the cop- 
persmiths hated Paul and Silas. It is not 
known, therefore, what were all the causes 
which carried Christ to the cross. Many 
hands are now unseen. 

Of the known ones, the fear of a new 
religion, the fear of a new claimant for a 
throne, the longing of the Jews for a military 
chieftain, the non-combatant, peace-loving 
nature of Christ, his preference for a spiritual 



200 MO TIVES OF LIFE. 

kingdom, of which a large part should be 
beyond the grave, one by one these have all 
faded, until almost no trace remains of what 
once made the Son of Man objectionable to 
the age in which he lived and died. The 
clouds which once blinded the eyes of a 
whole epoch and made it exultingly lead the 
Man of Nazareth up to the dreadful Gol- 
gotha, have all passed away, and left the sky 
of truth more serene in our nation than it 
was in the day of the Apostles. What might 
be called the Christ-motive is doubtless more 
visible to our age than it was to the myriads, 
amid which that life was lived. 

It was apparently incredible to Judas 
Iscariot that his master would not escape 
from the hands of his foes. Judas wished to 
make money slyly out of some miracle. The 
two disciples on the way to Emmaus, expres- 
sed their disappointment in Christ's death ; 
they had hoped he was suddenly to expand 



THE CHRIST -MOTIVE. 201 

into a king. Peter had denied all relation- 
ship with the man. Thus hearts the meanest 
and hearts the purest were wholly unable to 
grasp a kingdom which was to sweep far 
beyond Judea and Rome; a kingdom which 
was to draw impulse from the very cross 
upon which the disciples thought the leader 
had surrendered his cause ; unable were they 
to conceive of an empire which should make 
its home, not among a few years, but among 
the centuries. With many of the disciples 
three years had begun and ended the work of 
their Lord ; but now it is known that eighteen 
centuries were not to exhaust a single doc- 
trine he uttered, or a single quality of soul he 
revealed. No blame can rest upon those 
disciples for not seeing the greatness of their 
office. How could they see in three years 
what the subsequent 1800 years have only 
partly revealed? No man is greater than 
his age permits him to be. Among the 



202 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

disciples lay a world and a future no greater 
than themselves. As America was outside of 
their geography, so was a slow and far- 
reaching Savior beyond their religious dream. 
Men who can look back have an advantage 
over those who can look only forward. For 
this reason, age is intellectually greater than 
youth. Youth has more of enthusiasm and 
poetry, but its facts are fewer and are held 
with a gentler grasp. Age sees the world 
more truly, because it has passed over it. It 
has not skimmed aloug above it as though 
high up in clouds, but over each square yard 
of the low and high ground has it moved, 
and often with bleeding feet. Thus the large 
world has its age, and now our century can 
look back upon Christ with a clearer vision 
than that with which the first century looked 
at him, in great Jerusalem or in little Naza- 
reth. It can see the deeds and character of 
Christ, passing along among the generations 



THE CHRIST- MOTIVE. 203 

as they came and went ; can hear all those 
words of eloquence sounding, where Augus- 
tine and his mother talked and prayed, in the 
fourth century, and where Madame Guyon 
sang in the seventeenth. If a few Jews 
hearing once this Teacher said, "He spake as 
never man spake," much more can this era 
make the same affirmation, for it can ask the 
witness of more centuries, and can follow the 
words into the inner recesses of more hearts. 
It looks into those words from the experience 
of eighteen centuries. 

The Christ-motive becomes each age more 
visible. The Christ-impulse has been made 
more clear by a constant differentiation. 
The non-essential and the wholly irrelevant 
have died, or are dying on the long route. 
There is no fear of a king who might rival 
the Csesars; for time has placed all those 
throne-holders beyond the reach of rivalry. 
While the empires and republics have been 



204 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

rising and falling, the world has been learn- 
ing the meaning of a spiritual kingdom that 
can flourish within an empire or a republic, 
and can redouble the value of either limited 
monarchy or of liberty. What enhances now 
the worth of England's royalty, or America's 
equality, is the presence of that spiritual 
emporium, which is contained within the 
monarchy and the republic. Instead of 
coming to destroy Caesar it is now seen that 
the more of the Christ-truth there is in a 
nation the more lasting the throne or the 
republic. Of such an empire within an 
empire, the disciples themselves could have 
had no conception. When their master said : 
"Bender unto Caesar the things that are 
Caesar's," the words must have seemed to 
them only the language of temporary pru- 
dence. They thought the morrow would end 
such a kindness of speech. But the morrow 
came, and on went the governments of man ; 



TEE CHRIST- MOTIVE. 205 

but within their confines slowly arose the 
dominion of the Spirit. Russia's Czar would 
wear his crown more peacefully to-day were 
the kingdom of Christ within the kingdom of 
all the Russias. Siberia would not anger 
the world, Poland would not be a second 
shame, the Nihilists would never have come 
into their unhappy being. 

Thus time has destroyed the reasons in 
part for which the Nazarene was crucified. 
Instead of being an enemy of any de facto 
state, he brought a philosophy which could 
have conferred upon any republic or king- 
dom the charm of perpetual youth. 

Isolated thus from any war upon the state, 
Christ stands isolated also from the reproach 
which his simplicity of origin and of raiment, 
and which his womanly gentleness brought. 
It is only recent time that has been able to do 
justice to the soul in itself considered. 
There has been in late generations a wonder- 



206 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

ful array of witnesses, whose testimony lias 
exalted peace and simplicity, and has pushed 
back not a little the entire pomp and circum- 
stance of the past. Citizens going into the 
presence of the Queen of England, are attired 
as amazing soldiers of some past age. With 
head erect and with rattling sword, the 
modern advances toward the person in power ; 
but the form is full of public laughter, 
because all hearts know that all such external 
trappings are only a childish memory of 
foolish days. The mind and heart are the 
emblems of modern greatness. Our age finds 
no objection to the simple dress and simple 
life of Jesus. All these terms, such as " Car- 
penter's son, " " Man from Nazareth, " have 
been emptied of their significance, and the 
Christ-impulse having escaped from the 
jealousy of the Csesars, has escaped also from 
the old worshipers of purple and scarlet. 



THE CEBI8T- MOTIVE. 207 

Our age would now ask Christ to come as he 
came. 

Having escaped from its early enemies, the 
second great success of this impulse was its 
escape from its friends. The first friends of 
Jesus were disappointed that he declined 
to be a military leader, and that his heart was 
fixed more upon immortality than upon time. 
Those first friends cannot be reproached, for 
it has taken the world many centuries 
to learn that war is an awful error, and that 
the genius of the world ought to be peace. 
The peaceful years that are now passing 
over all the western nations — years, in which 
France, Germany, England, and indeed all 
the states, large and small, are mending their 
fortunes, tilling their fields, building their 
homes, are eloquent commentaries upon his 
wisdom, who said " the peace-makers are 
blessed, " who commanded a military disciple 
to put up his sword. What once seemed a 



208 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

weakness in the character of Christ is now 
confessed to be proof of his deep wisdom. 

Nor is it any longer an objection to Christ 
that his kingdom lay not wholly in time, but 
also partly beyond the flood. That the suf- 
fering Jews longed for an earthly Savior 
was pardonable ; for they had been trampled 
under foot for many long centuries. The 
crimes committed against their holy city had 
made all patriotic hearts long for an in- 
vincible king. Heaven, so far as thought 
of, was dim and far away. Jerusalem and 
Judea were the burden of all Jewish thought. 
Never lived there a people more attached to 
their own nation. All their laws and cus- 
toms, those of religion, those of politics 
proper, their exclusiveness, their race-pride, 
their special relations to Jehovah, made that 
land surpass in patriotic attachments all the 
peoples that have ever lived. " If I forget 
thee, Oh Jerusalem ! let my right hand 



TEE CHRIST- MOTIVE. 209 

forget its cunning " were words not spoken 
of heaven, but of that earthly region which 
flowed with milk and honey. The barbar- 
ians and the Romans who had so often 
desecrated their country, made the Jews look 
into the face of each male child, to see if 
perhaps the promised Savior had at last 
come. To such a throng it was only an 
offense that a person talking of peace and 
heaven should attempt to fulfill the predic- 
tions of their prophets and gratify their sense 
of historic justice. Only a little group could 
accept of a Jerusalem beyond the grave. 
The vast majority derided the strange kind 
of Savior, and said : Let him be crucified. 

Since that day many generations have 
passed, and all forms of triumphant generals 
have come and gone. Some have come, 
bringing liberty to the white race, some 
liberty to the black, but whatever they have 
done for mankind they have done nothing to 



210 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

lessen the need of a fatherland beyond the 
closing scene of this life. The more man 
triumphs upon Earth, triumphs in education, 
in morals, in friendship, in every attribute of 
humanity, the more inadequate does earth 
become, and the more he needs the outlook 
of the endless world. What would it have 
availed the Jews had Jesus led the Hebrews 
to an earthly triumph? Borne was led to 
triumph, but what did that splendor accom- 
plish for those who lived in its noonday? 
Victory and defeat are one now in that dust- 
covered past. What was once the reproach 
of Christ is now his glory ; for if there is one 
Leader the modern world needs, it is one who 
can lead to immortality. The mind of man 
has outgrown the confines of time. He takes 
his studies, his longings, his worship, his 
friendships, all in his arms and bowing before 
his Creator, he humbly asks for a second 
life. He does not claim it as a right, he 






THE CHRIST -MOTIVE. 211 

simply appeals to God's love. The very- 
education of society has imperiled its peace. 
Each generation of culture makes this world 
less complete. No earthly state can ever be 
glorious enough in peace, arts and justice 
to obliterate from the heart the hope of a still 
better land beyond the tomb. What was 
once the reproach of Christ, that he had not 
come to batter down Roman walls, and place 
the crown upon the sons of Solomon and 
David, has now become his glory; for crowns 
and republics fade to us all in three and 
thirty years, and in such kingdoms and 
republics the more of education and refine- 
ment, the more at last of sorrow. Therefore 
the Christ-motive of a land beyond earth, 
has cast aside all its deformity and will 
gather power and beauty with the advance of 
the human heart. It is grander in the 
present than it was in the past. 

The Christ-impulse stands thus improved 



212 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

by a growing isolation. It is a wonderful 
piece of public good fortune that the same 
intellectual progress which has made the age 
so powerful to attack the Christian system, 
has made the friends of the system powerful 
to discover and cast away a large amount of 
irrelevant matter. The Christ-motive is an 
isolated, self-adequate strain in this religious 
music. Those theologians who for genera- 
tions attempted to make it sound in harmony 
with the shrill notes of Moses, or afterward 
with the harsh notes of Tertullian and 
Calvin, have detected the discord, and now 
the peculiar tones of the Christ-theme are 
sounded alone, and a melody overwhelmed 
by the debates and martyrdoms and battle 
cries of the past fall in a new sweetness upon 
the present and the future. 

If any young or older mind is finding the 
task grievons of carrying in the intellect, 
and in the heart that great bulk, called the 



THE CHRIST- M0T1 YE. 213 

Christian System, that mind may find rest 
and peace by casting aside many an Abra- 
ham, many a Solomon, many a Calvin, many 
a Luther, many a name and flag of many a 
sect, and by drawing nearer to the one Christ- 
impulse. It is one of those tones which is so 
sweet and sublime, that the listener asks 
all choruses and accompaniments to be 
hushed, that the heart may hear only the 
long wished for accents. To be filled, to be 
carried away with that one Christ-motive, 
that is Christianity, that is religion, that is 
salvation. 



THE NEW IMAGINATION; 

A NEW IMPULSE OF LIFE. 



IX. 



THE NEW imagination; a new impulse of 

LIFE. 

Many persons are troubled because imagin- 
ation seems to have declined. Where, they 
lament, are those brains which once could 
smite upon our planet and make giants, 
fairies, and goddesses come forth? Whither 
have all those minds gone who once could so 
people the air, sky, woods, and waters with 
powerful or beautiful forms of rational life ? 
No one remains to see the doves of Noah 
bringing him olive leaves, nor the doves of 
Virgil alighting upon a branch of solid gold ; 
no one sees the ravens carrying food to 
Elijah, nor hears the dying swan sing a fare- 
well to earth. Neither the modern Caesar 
nor his high priest watches the flight of the 
pigeons to see whether the Ides of March 

(217) 



218 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

are laden with evil. The trees have ceased 
meeting to choose a king, and have cared 
little for the harp of any modern Orpheus. 
The mistletoe of the oak has lost its sacred 
relation to the Druid's god, and the oaks of 
Dodona no longer ring into listening ears any 
words of prophecy. The autumn leaves 
under our feet no longer carry the detached 
predictions of the raving sibyl. Gone are all 
the Homers, the Dantes, the Miltons, and the 
John Bunyans. 

An Atlantis was, indeed, sunk, but the 
equilibrium of nature has been preserved, for 
the sinking of Atlantis has pressed upward 
a new continent, as a sinking wave makes a 
similar wave rise by its side. 

There is little danger that man will ever 
lose his imagination. There is little danger 
that culture will ever render the mind incap- 
able of adding up figures and of reasoning 
from premises to a conclusion, incapable of 



THE NEW IMAGINATION. 219 

memory or hope; and no greater is the 
danger that the imagination of man has gone 
away or is meditating an exit from our 
world. No great department of the soul is 
liable to withdraw from the wonderful 
brotherhood of faculties. What we have 
found, and must still more expect, is a 
change of the subject-matter upon which 
the imagination is plying and will ply its 
precious art. For each piece of imagery 
that has disappeared some new piece has 
come. The kind of wonders which Homer 
saw — invincible warriors, magic sword and 
spear, a coat of mail made by Vulcan, 
Cyclops, Harpy, Circe, with her enchant- 
ments; Ulysses, changed from a ragged 
beggar to a colossal king, have fallen out 
of men's hands because those hands were 
daily becoming more full of new images of 
things in heaven and upon earth. The 
imagination is not dying, it is only changing 



220 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

its pictures. Our school teachers all made 
us distinguish between fancy and imagina- 
tion. Fancy was said to be the more playful 
art. It made Queen Mab ride in a chariot 
made of a nutshell, 

" Made by the joiner, squirrel, or old grub." 

It made the animals of iEsop speak like 
sages; it made the cicada dance in summer 
and beg food of the ant in winter ; but when 
some more serious work was spread out in 
prose or verse or art, when some hero like 
Achilles or Hector moved before us in all 
the similitude of a vast truth, then, said our 
teachers, this is imagination. iEsop dealt in 
fancy, Sophocles and Milton in imagination. 
But all that teaching went to show that 
there is in the mind a permanent image- 
making power, but that the fashion of the 
objects change. The faculty which built up 
Achilles and gave him an impenetrable 
coat of mail no longer likes its great warrior 



THE NEW IMAGINATION. 221 

and could not now be persuaded to create 
a similar form of manhood. Milton's " Para- 
dise Lost" could not now be produced. 
Imagination remaining one and the same, 
its images change under the influence of an 
age, and the same painter in the soul that 
sketched yesterday the angel Ariel moves 
to-day to a new canvas and delineates a new 
form of fallen or unfallen soul. Fancy 
would seem to be the childhood of imagina- 
tion. As little children can make a horse 
out of a stick and wagons out of spools, but 
as the older minds wish the horse and wagon 
to be more real, thus fancy rises up to imagi- 
nation and fades away as fancy to become a 
truer picture ; imagination asks for more and 
more of truthfulness as reason and education 
hasten forward. Imagination is not a falsi- 
fying faculty. It loves to take pictures of 
some hidden reality, but it never makes 
well-known deformity sit for beauty, nor a 



222 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

known falsehood sit for a truth. When 
Milton made his pictures of the celestial and 
infernal realms, they were thought by the 
Christian world to be probable copies of the 
real facts. The creations of the " Paradise 
Lost" lay within the easy reach of the 
public belief; but to our age, the council 
which met in hell to lay plans for the ruin 
of Adam and Eve, and from which council 
Satan went as a foreign emissary of evil, are 
ideas so incredible that in order to work at 
such pictures imagination would need to fall 
back to childish fancy. Milton's war in 
heaven, where cannons roared and where 
swords gleamed, were near the truth as 
perceived in the mind that was just emerging 
from those dark ages in which Luther threw 
an inkstand at Satan and in which the Ro- 
man Church saw devils afterward conducting 
the funeral of Luther. In these latter years, 
all that scenery is so far away from the truth 



THE NEW IMAGINATION. 223 

that imagination has withdrawn from that 
realm ; but not to die, but to work once 
more in the empire of what is more real. 
The dog Cerberus could bark in Homer and 
Virgil and Milton, because that ''hell-hound" 
came within the common bounds of public 
faith, but imagination in these years compels 
that three-mouthed barking monster to pass 
away, because that faculty never rears its 
structure upon straw, upon well-known false- 
hoods, but upon the solid stones of truth. 
Much of past imagination has become fancy 
now, and a new task comes to employ the 
poetic powers of our profounder age. 

Those who are lamenting that mental 
imagery has been killed by the business of 
the age must be mistaking the objects of 
imagination for the faculty itself. Many old 
objects have died. The entire pathway of 
man lies strewn with the ruins of the build- 
ings reared by Homer, ruins of the ships 



224 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

that sailed for the Golden Fleece, ruins of 
Calypso's grotto, ruins of the palaces which 
once arose from Aladdin's lamp, ruins of the 
helmets which made the knight invisible 
and of the lances that were irresistible, but 
instead of dying along with these objects the 
creative mind has covered all these ruins over 
with fresh flowers. 

The old pictures all remain in literature 
to be revisited when the heart wishes to 
change the scene of its meditation and pleas- 
ure ; and many are the hours when all 
prefer to go back and tarry a while where 
birds uttered warnings and words of cheer 
and where trees danced for the lute. Noth- 
ing has been taken away. What change 
then has come? Has not the pursuit of 
wealth ruined the creative powers of the 
intellect? The most evident change has 
been brought along by the growth of reason 
A reasoning power has come which has taken 



THE NEW IMAGINATION. 225 

the charm away from childish fancy and 
redoubled the charm of the highest and 
deepest truth. The spiritual powers all 
follow the greatest paths of their special time. 
As reason no longer loves to inquire : What 
is the Trinity? What is space? What is 
time ? but would prefer to ask : What is 
man? What is education? What is happi- 
ness? so the imagination does not go with 
its old eagerness to paint a Cerberus or a 
Cyclops, it feels the new pressure of the new 
period, and would select its subjects from the 
riches of the new world. But the passing 
world is remarkable in this one thing, that 
it is occupied wholly by man. The nymphs, 
goddesses, giants, ghosts and imps have all 
passed away. Here toils and rests, dwells 
and studies, weeps and laughs, only the one 
family, that of man ; and, therefore, that 
imagination which once roved so widely now 
finds its themes within the confines of human 



226 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

life. Hither came slowly but surely the 
whole volume of modern thought, and the 
creative soul which once was busy about the 
marvelous of the olden time, at last hangs 
with deeper thought over that which is the 
most marvelous now. If Gray's elegy in the 
country churchyard differs from any hundred 
lines of Homer or Virgil, the difference comes 
not from any decline of poetic power, but 
because our age thinks more about the 
solemn scenes of human life than it ponders 
over the legends of Achilles and iEneas. 
Neither Homer nor Virgil ever produced 
such a picture as that delineated in the 
hundred or more lines of Thomas Gray. 
They possess no superior in all the volumes 
of antiquity. In these stanzas imagination 
does not need to borrow any magical arms 
or divinities or supernatural situations ; the 
setting sun, the curfew bell, the lowing 
herds, the ivy mantled towers, the children 



THE NEW IMAGINATION. 227 

climbing on the parents' knee, "the boast of 
heraldry, the pomp of power," the "storied 
ten/' the "madding crowd," all are so 
woven together that there is no room and no 
wish for any importation from the classic 
land or from the old Orient. The simple 
truths are so picked up from common human 
life, and so set into one beauty and one 
eloquence that, read along with these modern 
lines, the poems from the old wonderland 
become empty of the richest and highest 
significance. 

Thus, within the borders of man's actual 
life, lies the poetry of Robert Burns, Mrs. 
Browning, and, indeed, the entire modern 
school of the highest thought. All modern 
verses begin and end in man. All the poems 
we know by heart are those of friendship, 
love, memory, patriotism, and religion, be- 
cause the world is so occupied by man him- 
self that we learn nothing by heart except 



228 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

that which lies very near the human well- 
being. The poetic element of society changes 
to meet the new concern of every statesman 
and philanthropist, and that creative art 
which once sketched a legend or a fable now 
sits down among the vicissitudes of humanity. 
Are we to say that the present has lost the 
old and high attributes when it is the first age 
that ever reproduced in its own heart the 
sufferings of the exiles in Siberia? the 
soldiers and slaves of a despot? and the 
common sorrows of the poor women and 
children? Instead of being deficient in 
imagination, this is probably the first period 
that ever used its highest faculties for the 
perception and inculcation of the highest 
truths. 

To create the character of Lucile or Evan- 
geline demands as much genius as is required 
to sketch the Laocoon or a Hercules or a 
Miltonian fiend or angel. The imagination 



THE NEW IMAGINATION. 229 

of Dickens in his words of benevolence is as 
great as was that of Cervantes or Eugene 
Sue, the difference being only in the quality 
of the creations — the people in the stories of 
Dickens being all related to the greater 
happiness of the widespread poor. 

While the Miltonian genius and Dantean 
genius were building up their gorgeous pal- 
aces, women were publicly whipped for petty 
offences with no limit to the blows except 
that they must be laid on until the naked 
back was bloody. In all these years, when 
Milton and Shakespeare were making such 
poetic flights, prisoners in jail slept upon 
boards or the floor, not even straw being 
furnished; no clothing allowed, except what 
might belong to the prisoner, no fire fur- 
nished in winter. To such horrible jails 
were added cages like those for holding wild 
beasts ; stocks, many there were in each 
village, and whipping posts at all points. In 



230 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

that long period the high poetic and religious 
sentiments were finding their themes away 
from the confines of the actual human race. 
There were sensibility and refinement, but 
they were modified by their surroundings and 
were wholly suspended as to man. Queen 
Elizabeth was herself full of imagination as 
to some kinds of poetry, full of imagination 
as to how a jeweled stomacher would look 
or how a certain marvellous collar would set 
off her haughty but otherwise empty head ; 
but to these and a coarse life and indelicate 
speech she added a cruelty that would in our 
age find parallel only in some few of those 
hospital officials who have recently betrayed 
toward the insane and the helpless the ferocity 
of the Inquisition. Here and there in an 
asylum or hospital now existing can be seen 
the barbarism which once covered our world 
all over and which broke limbs on the rack 
and flogged men and women to death while 



TEE NEW IMAGINATION. 231 

the poems of Dante, Shakespeare and Milton 
were passing through the air like music. 
The most common phenomenon now is imagi- 
nation making the pictures of love. 

What is modern philanthropy but the ad- 
vent of a poetry that can feel the calamities 
of another? Philanthropy is an imagination 
that can picture another's pain. The physi- 
cians who ply their art in asylums should be 
not only physicians, but also the poets of love 
and mercy. A medical diploma confers no 
fitness for practice among the poor and help- 
less. To the diploma of medical science must 
be added one signed by the merciful name of 
Jesus Christ and by the tenderness of the 
human heart. Often physicians are the most 
heartless of all characters, for, wherever their 
rudeness was in excess before they studied 
their art, they found in their surgery and 
experiments only a further development of 
their insensibility. 



232 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

This science and practice make a hard 
heart harder, but also a kind nature still more 
kind. But, aside from all theories, none but 
the minds the wisest and hearts the kindest 
should ever even sweep the floor of a hospital 
or an asylum. Founded in the name of 
mercy, mercy alone should ever touch foot 
within such sacred walls. 

The philanthropy which is making the 
Christian nations so much better implies 
nothing so clearly as that man's power to 
draw images has begun to seek those images 
in a new field of objective forms. No fancy 
is more powerful than that which can put 
you in a sufferer's place. It has long been 
the privilege of the mind to put itself into 
the place of warriors, heroes, lovers, orators 
and poets. Often, when man is young and 
well and music is sounding, the heart can, in 
a half hour of rapture, move through all the 
forms of exalted life and pass from hero to 



TEE NEW IMAGINATION. 233 

orator and from orator to a throne as easily 
as Dante and Beatrice went from star to star 
in heaven ; but the triumph of the picture- 
art comes when the mind can drop downward 
and put itself in the place of the man who is 
overtaken by illness and poverty at once ; in 
the place of the boy who stands with bare 
feet in the snow that covers the grave of his 
mother. That faculty called creative force 
will never be complete while it can only cast 
itself into the bosom of greatness to live its 
emblazoned life ; it must be able, also, to feel 
the lash that falls upon a dumb brute, and to 
read the wide-open eyes of an orphan girl 
who does not yet know the possible blackness 
of her eighteenth year. The whole import of 
the word imagination is that it must picture 
to us what we have not and are not ; that our 
world may be greater than ourself. The 
heart that has no imagination dwells in a 
world that is only five or six feet long, and 



234 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

that weighs only one or two hundred pounds ; 
the heart that has imaginations lives in im- 
mensity. The ocean which is a thousand 
miles away is its ocean, the birds which are 
singing in all the woods of America are in its 
own grove, all the triumphs of man are its 
triumphs, and the sorrows of society draw its 
many and warm tears. This is the philoso- 
phy of the word imagination. It stands for 
that overflow of the heart that changes at last 
a fountain into a great river. It helps the 
glittering dewdrop to become a sun. It 
makes man live in immensity and immor- 
tality. 

It is difficult to measure the quantity of 
poetic power in a given age. It may be that 
our age possesses a smaller quantity than was 
allowed to some of the literary spots in the 
past, but it must be confessed a piece of good 
fortune that this age, which so seeks and finds 
wealth, should be the one that prefers the 



THE NEW IMAGINATION. 235 

scenes of benevolence to those of the old and 
grotesque fancy. It is, at least, a singular 
coincidence that the age of greed and of 
humanity should have met in one of the 
highways of time; that the Germans, the 
English, the Americans who can see farthest 
the glitter of the precious metals, can also 
write the best literature and religion of life 
and can soonest of all times reach out to the 
unfortunate a helping hand. Wealth like 
modern wealth once ruined Persia, Egypt, 
Rome and Spain. This wave of ruin is now 
kept back, perhaps, by the new poetry of the 
age — the poetry, not of giants and goddesses, 
but of the human race. 

Our millionaires may not be wise and 
famous as critics of Greek and all ancient 
sculpture, but it is matter of profound joy 
that they would rather see a statue of two 
ragged boys taking their first lesson under a 
loving teacher in a free school of common 



236 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

education or art or religion than gaze at the 
Laocoon in Rome. The "Twin serpents 
from Tenedos " twisting around those human 
figures are not so full of ideas nor of such 
grand ideas as would spring up over this more 
modern group. Ancient art dealt more in 
the beauty of the body, while modern art 
deals more in the attributes of the soul. 

Much of the complaint against modern 
taste as being dead or dull comes not from 
the fact that it is dead in its sentiments, but 
that it is dead to the old past. The heart is 
warm as ever, and stands impassioned in the 
presence of beauty, but the objects of beauty 
must be taken in part from the times that 
encompass our paths and our homes. The 
past must not be destroyed. Not a leaf must 
be broken from the wreath of Bacchus, not a 
finger harmed in the statue of a goddess or a 
saint, but the new mind now in the world 
must be permitted to pass from the wreaths 



THE NEW IMAGINATION. 237 

of Bacchus to those of liberty and religion, 
and from the rosy neck of Venus to the 
more spiritual splendor of the human family. 
Imagination dying! It can not die, for 
it is almost the entire human soul. It is 
never for an hour absent from any high 
mind. It comes each noon to picture the 
evening; comes each evening to make an 
outline sketch of the next day; comes in 
midwinter to hold spring up before the heavy 
heart; it comes in May with its offerings of 
June's deeper beauty ; it makes the heart an 
urn into which it empties uncounted treasures; 
it makes of it a perpetual gallery of art, where 
the pictures of the past hang among those of 
the present and the future. This imagination 
dying ! It is just now beginning to live! It 
practiced upon the foreheads of the non- 
existing that, after school days had passed, it 
might sit down by the existing human race 
where real joys and griefs could come ; it 



238 MOTIVES OF LIFE. 

carried its offerings to a hundred deities who 
were encamped upon Olympus or were hunt- 
ing sacred deer in holy forests, but only to fit 
itself at last for casting down its gold, frank- 
incense and myrrh before an object more real 
and for bowing at the .throne of the one true 
and infinite God. 

It was the defect of the Mosaic age that 
those who came near the Hebrew God had to 
veil their faces so as not to see him in all or 
a tenth of his beauty. Paul announced a 
great change as having come. As a man can 
look into a mirror and see his own face, thus 
may he with face unveiled come into the 
presence of his God ; as though in a glass see 
all that divine splendor, and may gaze at it 
until the human features mingle with the 
divine or until man seems changed into the 
same image from glory to glory as if lifted 
upward by the omnipotent hand. 

Thus have many human faculties, reason, 



THE NEW IMAGINATION. 239 

religious faith, and imagination moved along 
so veiled that the objects they should have 
seen clearly were poorly seen and poorly 
loved, but now the veil is being rent and 
plucked from the eye, and the oneness and 
the goodness of God are more clearly seen, 
and the faces of a myriad of fanciful beings, 
supposed once to dwell in wood or by 
stream, all blend into one sweetness and one 
amazing and awful reality, that of man. 
Henceforth, with unveiled face, imagination 
must look into the great mirror of nature and 
see man and God — Creator and child, with 
features blending as though man came from 
heaven and was destined to go back to his 
home. 



HTHE STANDARD OPERAS. Their Plots, 

■*■ their Music, and their Composers. By George P. 
Upton. i2mo, 371 pages, yellow edges, $1.50; extra gilt, 
gilt edges, $2.00. 

In half calf, gilt top, . . . . $3 25 

In half morocco, gilt top, . . . 3 50 

In half morocco, gilt edges, . . - 3 75 



" The summaries of the plots are so clear, logical and well 
written, that one can read them with real pleasure, which can 
not be said of the ordinary operatic synopses. But the most 
important circumstance is that Mr. Upton's book is fully 
abreast of the times." — The Nation (New York). 

"Mr. Upton has performed a service that can hardly be too 
highly appreciated, in collecting the plots, music and the 
composers of the standard operas, to the number of sixty-four, 
and bringing them together in one perfectly arranged volume. 
. . . His work is one simply invaluable to the general reading 
public. Technicalities are avoided, the aim being to give to 
musically uneducated lovers of the opera a clear understanding 
of the works they hear. It is description, not criticism, and 
calculated to greatly increase the intelligent enjoyment of 
music." — The Boston Traveller. 

" Among the multitude of handbooks which are published 
every year, and are described by easy-going writers of book- 
notices as supplying a long- felt want, we know of none which 
so completely carries out the intention of the writer as * The 
Standard Operas,' by Mr. George P. Upton, whose object is to 
present to his readers a comprehensive sketch of each of the 
operas contained in the modern repertory. . . . There are 
thousands of music-loving people who will be glad to have the 
kind of knowledge which Mr. Upton has collected for their 
benefit, and has cast in a clear and compact form." — R. H. 
Stoddatd, in " The Evening Mail and Expt ess" (New York). 



Sold by all booksellers, or mailed, post-paid, on receipt of 
price, by 

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^HE STANDARD ORATORIOS. Their 

-*■ Stories, their Music, and their Composers, A Hand- 
book. By George P. Upton. i2mo, 335 pages, yellow 
edges, $1.50; extra gilt, gilt edges, $2. 

In half calf, gilt top, . . $3 25 

In half morocco, gilt top, . . 3 50 

In half morocco, gilt edges, . . 3 75 



" Music lovers are under a new obligation to Mr. Upton for 
this companion to his " Standard Operas," — two books which 
deserve to be placed on the same shelf with Grove's and 
Riemann's musical dictionaries." — The Nation, New York. 

" Mr. George P. Upton has followed in the lines that he laid 
down in his " Standard Operas, "and has produced an admirable 
handwork, which answers every purpose that such a volume is 
designed to answer." — The Mail and Express, New York. 

" Like the valuable art hand books of Mrs. Jamison, these 
volumes contain a world of interesting information, indis- 
pensable to critics and art amateurs. The volume under 
review is elegantly and succinctly written, and the subjects 
are handled in a thoroughly comprehensive manner." — Public 
Opinion Washington. 

"The book is a masterpiece of skilful handling, charming 
the reader with its pure English style, and keeping his atten- 
tion always awake in an arrangement of matter which makes 
each succeeding page and chapter fresh in interest and always 
full of instruction, while always entertaining." — The Standard, 
Chicago. 

" The author of this book has done a real service to the vast 
number of people who, while they are lovers of music, have 
neither the leisure nor inclination to become deeply versed in 
its literature. . . . The information conveyed is of just the 
sort that the average of cultivated people will welcome as an 
aid to comprehending and talking about this species of musical 
composition." — Church Magazine, Philadelphia. 



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THE STANDARD CANTATAS. Their 
A Stories, Their Music, and Their Composers. A Hand- 
book. By George P. Upton. i2mo, 367 pages, yellow 
edges, $1.50; extra gilt, gilt edges, $2.00. 

In half calf, gilt top, . . . . $3 25 
In half morocco, gilt top, . . 3 50 

In half morocco, gilt edges, . . 3 75 



" It is the only handbook and guide for musicians and their 
friends, and is as valuable as either of the two admirable 
works preceding it." — The Globe, Boston. 

' Mr. Upton describes these cantatas very clearly. The 
book may be warmly commended to those who are fond of 
music as containing information which can be found in no 
other single work." — The Chronicle, San Francisco. 

" A new book from the pen of Mr. Upton, relating in any 
way to music, is sure to be welcomed, not only by musicians 
but by the general public, for he has a happy way of treating 
what most people consider a very dry subject in a most enter- 
taining manner." — 7 he Chicago Tribune. 

" The general reader of musical literature will find here an 
account of the principal cantatas, the stories upon which they 
are founded, the characteristics of the music, and brief sketches 
of the lives of the composers. The plan of the work is the 
same as that of the author's handbooks on the standard operas 
and oratorios. His purpose is to furnish a guide to those not 
familiar with the field, rather than an exhaustive criticism for 
adepts in the science." — The Home Journal, New York. 

" A book that describes and analyzes the many cantatas of 
the world must therefore be a book that ranges through the 
wide realm of music. The author of the ' Standard Cantatas ' 
appreciates the situation. He enters heartily into his work of 
definition, discrimination, biography, history, incident, explan- 
ation. Mr. Upton's book is designed for lovers of music. . . 
It covers ground that has never been carefully worked and 
Mr. Upton does his task with fidelity, spirit, taste." — The 
Illustrated Christian Weekly, New York. 



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HTHE STANDARD SYMPHONIES. Their 
A History, Their Music, and Their Composers. A 
Handbook. By George P. Upton. i2mo, 321 pages, yellow 
edges, $1.50; extra gilt, gilt edges, $2.00. 

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In half morocco, gilt edges, . . 3 75 

" The usefulness of this handbook can not be doubted. Its 
pages are full of these fascinating renderings. The accounts 
of each composer are succinct and yet sufficient. The author 
has done a genuine service to the world of music lovers. The 
comprehension of orchestral work of the highest character is 
aided efficiently by this volume." — Public Opinion, Washington. 

" There has never been, in this country at least, so thorough 
an attempt to collate the facts of programme music. . . . As a 
definite helper in some cases and as a refresher in others we 
believe Mr. Upton's book to have a lasting value. = . . The 
book, in brief, shows enthusiastic and honorable educational 
purpose, good taste, and sound scholarship." — The American, 
Philadelphia. 

" It is written in a style that can not fail to stimulate the 
reader, if also a student of music, to strive to find for himself 
the underlying meanings of the compositions of the great 
composers. It contains, besides a vast amount of information 
about the symphony, its evolution and structure, with sketches 
of the composers, and a detailed technical description of a few 
symphonic models. It meets a recognized want of all concert 
goers." — The Chautauquan. 

" The explanations of the meaning of the different move- 
ments in the symphonies, and of the various themes employed, 
are useful and instructive. Mr. Upton's interpretations are 
as helpful as they are fascinating. For those who have not 
yet heard the compositions described, they are excellent guides 
toward a more intelligent understanding of the music. And 
even those already familiar with these compositions will find 
new suggestions in this volume, and will be interested in the 
interpretations, as clear and interesting expressions of impres- 
sions made on the author." — The Epoch, New York. 

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New Edition, re-written and greatly enlarged. 



"WOMAN IN MUSIC. 

By George P. Upton, Author of "The Standard Operas," etc. 
i6mo, 222 pages. Price, $1.00. 

"Woman in Music," by George P. Upton, the author of 
" Standard Operas" and other valuable contributions to musical 
literature, is a novel venture in literature and full of interest and 
suggestion. Its facts and illustrations, drawn from unusually- 
wide reading, are very fresh and curious, and the charming little 
brochure might justly be said to contain the romance of musical 
history. 

It is divided into three parts. In the first, the author discusses 
the much vexed question why so few women have been gifted with 
musical creative power of the highest order, and traces the real 
relations of woman to music. 

In the second part, the influence of woman in inspiring the 
highest musical composition is shown in a series of short biograph- 
ical sketches of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, 
Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Handel, Weber, and Wagner. 
This part of the work is specially interesting and valuable, as it 
is replete with information not generally accessible, and reveals to 
the world many highly romantic episodes, and pictures the domes- 
tic phases of the lives of the great composers. 

In the third part, the relations of woman to the performance of 
vocal and instrumental music are considered, and numerous obser- 
vations of value are given which the author has gathered from his 
many years of experience as a musical critic. In following out this 
part of his subject he briefly reviews the careers of the most noted 
queens of song of the last two centuries, and cites opinions of 
contemporary criticism. 

An additional interest is given by an appendix containing a list 
of the prominent female composers of the past three centuries, and 
a list of the women to whom the great masters have dedicated 
their more important works. 

The book is the result of a very wide gleaning in the out-of-the- 
way fields of musical literature, and will be very fascinating to 
all who are interested in the more romantic phases of musical his- 
tory and biography. 

Sold by all booksellers, or mailed, postpaid, on 
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L very charming sketch of a most interesting 
character." — Boston Congre nationalist . 



LIFE OF MOZART. 

From the German of Dr. Louis Nohl. With portrait. 
Price, $1.00. 

" The work was well worthy of translation, for it is a model of 
short biography, containing- all that the student need know to un- 
derstand fully the works of the great composer. The translator 
has done his work in a very creditable manner, and the publishers 
have given it an appropriate dress." — Traveller, Boston. 

" The story of Mozart's life is told in language that fascinates 
by a simplicity and directness which impart delightful color to 
the attending recital of facts. . . We consider it advisable for 
every student in music to possess this book, for it is one of the 
most pleasing and instructive biographies of a musical composer 
that has been published for a long time. It is convenient in form 
and exquisitely tasteful in dress." — Home Journal, Boston. 

"It is scarcely possible to write about Mozart without some 
warmth of enthusiasm, but Herr Nohl has an intelligent appre- 
ciation ol the greatness of his genius, and of the important influ- 
ence of his work upon modern dramatic music, so that he gives 
us some genuine criticism along with his fine writing." — Times, 
Philadelphia. 

" It is a translation from the German of Louis Nohl, a writer 
who adds to literary tastes the familiarity with music which is 
especially desirably in the biography of a musical genius like Mo- 
zart. The brevity of the biography has not been secured at the 
expense of its style or of its fullness as a personal record — the for- 
mer being clear, elegant and unambitious, and the latter a rounded 
and sympathetic outline of the incidents of Mozart's brief and 
checkered life, particularly of those that exerted a formative or 
modifying influence upon his character as a man, or upon the 
development of his genius as an artist." — Harper's Monthly. 

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' ( A vivid picture of his life." — The Nation. 



LIFE OF BEETHOVEN. 

From the German of Dr. Louis Nohl. With portrait. 
Price, $1.00. 

" It gives in small compass a sympathetic and successful pic- 
ture of the struggles and successes of this great but melancholy 
genius." — Christian Advocate, New York. 

" In this book there is much for music students to linger over, 
and those who love to follow the great masters' career will find 
this story of the life of the greatest of them all peculiarly fascin- 
ating. No student can fully understand the great works of musi- 
cal art until he knows and can sympathize with the inner nature 
of the worker." — Musical Visitor, Cincinnati. 

" Nohl has a devoted love for the great composer and musician, 
and this he most beautifully imparts to his enthusiastic tribute, 
which is, nevertheless, a carefully written and just biography." — 
Home Journal, Boston. 

" The biography is accurate, and it has the especial value of 
connecting each one of Beethoven's important works quite clearly 
with the circumstances and moods under which it was composed. 
It meets the purpose of a popular biography unusually well." — 
Times, Philadelphia. 

" The reader of this biography will stand in awe before the 
transcendent genius of the grand artist,, and sorrowfully remember 
how poorly he was compensated for his great services during the 
sorrowful years of his life upon the earth. The book is one of 
absorbing interest, clearly and concisely written, and deserving of 
an honored place in every library." — Inter Ocean, Chicago. 

" How he lived and moved and acted in the flesh, and his suc- 
cessive trials, triumphs, and crowning glories are set forth in this 
acceptable volume with accuracy, graphic power, and most inter- 
esting particularity of detail. Whosoever hath music in his soul 
will read the work with avidity." — Evening Post, San Francisco. 

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"A well told story of a romantic life, "—Philadelphia 

Inquirer. 

LIFE OF HAYDN. 

From the German of Dr. Louis Nohl, by George P. Upton. With 
portrait. Price, $1.00. 

" While this biography is scholarly in a musical as well as liter- 
ary sense, it is yet so full of anecdote, and so bright in its social 
sketches, as to be wholly interesting, and makes a capital book to 
be read by musical students as well as by those who thirst for 
general intelligence." — Christian Advocate, New York. 

" A pleasant and vivid series of portraits of Haydn as child, 
youth and student, man and artist, that linger lovingly in the 
reader's mind long after the book is thrown aside. The work 
treats his life in detached epochs, and is devoted to the discussion 
of the results attained and their effect upon the musical world 
to-day. It is a handy little volume, alike in price, size, and char- 
acter, and is pretty sure of meeting the popular demand." — Post, 
B 'os ton. 

" A highly interesting picture of the genial, sensitive, and lov- 
able man, and a critically appreciative account of his career as a 
composer. . . . No fuller history of his career, the society in 
which he moved and of his personal life can be found than is 
given in this work." — Gazette, Boston. 

"It is an admirable translation, and records in simple style the 
story of the genial musician and lovable man, still known, after 
almost a century's elapse, among his own people by the endearing 
appellation of ' Papa.' " — Express, Btiffalo. 

" Dr Nohl's Life of Haydn, translated from the German by 
George P. Upton, we cordially recommend as an excellent trans- 
lation of a standard work, certain to interest and serve the music 
student. Dr. Nohl's biography is unique in respect to the 
strongly personal and private insight into Haydn the man, it 
affords us. Few artistic natures have been so well balanced, so 
pure and single in aim, and are worthier of study. . . It is a 
book to be praised and welcomed in English dress." — Independent, 
New York. 

Sold by all booksellers, or mailed, postpaid, on 
receipt of price by the publishers, 

A. C. McCLURG & COMPANY, 
Cor. Wabash Ave. and Madison St., Chicago. 



"A worthy companion to the other biographies 
of Dr. Nohl." — Musical Visitor, Cincinnati. 



LIFE OF WAGNER. 

From the German of Dr. Louis Nohl, by George P. Upton. With 
portrait. Price $1.00. 

"The translation is excellent. The portrait of Wagner in- 
cluded in this book is the finest we have seen. The face looks 
inspired." — Boston Globe. 

" Herr Nohl's biography is terse, concise, enthusiastic, and at 
the same time just. Anyone who wishes to get a clear idea of the 
'Music of the Future* and Wagner's life work will do well to read 
this volume." — Philadelphia Press. 

" It is a very concise biography, and gives in vigorous outlines 
those events of the life of the tone-poet which exercised the great- 
est influence upon his artistic career, his youth, his early studies, 
his first works, his sufferings, disappointments, his victories. It 
is a story of a strong life devoted to lofty aims." — Baltimore 
American. 

" So well considered and discriminating a record of his life as is 
here presented by Dr. Nohl, has something of value, therefore, 
for all classes of readers. . . . Careful analyses of Wagner's 
compositions are essential portions of the story, and are so skill- 
fully accomplished as to give additional value to the book." — 
Buffalo Express. 

" It gives the story of Wagner's career with all necessary detail; 
traces the influences under which his works were produced, and 
analyzes with perspicuity his various masterpieces. . . . The 
volume is one that every lover of music may read with advantage, 
for it provides a very clear idea of the mission which the composer 
sought to fulfill." — Literary World, Boston. 

" Dr. Nohl's Biographies of Musicians consist of the Lives of 
Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Liszt, and Wagner — 

5 volumes, in box, Cloth. Price, - $5 oo 

5 " " half Calf. " - - 12 50 

Sold by all booksellers, or mailed, postpaid, on 
receipt of price by the publishers, 

A. C. McCLURG & COMPANY, 
Cor. Wabash Ave. and Madison St., Chicago. 



"An enthusiastic biography of the great musical 
magician of to-day." — Christian Union, New York. 



LIFE OF LISZT. 

From the German of Dr. Louis Nohl, by George P. Upton. With 
portrait. Price, $1.00. 

" It is a most interesting and instructive volume, the only 
biography of Liszt, in English, which has appeared thus far in 
this country. We recommend it to all lovers of music." — Musical 
World, Cleveland. 

11 It is more than a mere biography of the great musician ; it 
is a comprehensive, sympathetic review of his personal and musi- 
cal characteristics, and is a thoroughly entertaining volume from 
beginning to end." — Post, Boston. 

" This volume is the fifth in the ' Biographies of Musicians,' 
by the same author, and is treated in that finished and polished 
style of criticism and review which characterises his preceding 
volumes. The book is prepared with a fine, clean cut engraving 
of Liszt." — Post, San Francisco. 

" In this Life of Liszt, Dr. Nohl had an attractive subject for 
a musical enthusiast. * * It is refreshed by incident and nar* 
rative, and is not overweighted by a too subtle analysis which a 
musical critic is often tempted to make, especially when dealing 
with such a phenomenon as Liszt." — Christian Register, Boston. 

" This biography of the ' Hungarian Wonder Child ' is writv 
ten with great simplicity and in perfect taste. Very interesting 
mention is made of the gypsies and how strongly these children 
of nature with their one art of music impressed Liszt as boy and 
man. He visited them in their out-door kingdom, slept with 
them under the open heavens, played with the children, made 
presents to the maidens, gossiped with their chiefs, and listened to 
their gypsy orchestras. At the age of twelve, he was, as a pianist, 
without a rival, and extraordinary as a composer. This biography 
is wholly successful in all that it undertakes to portray. A strong 
idea is formed in the mind of the reader of the might of his 
genius and the beauty of his character." — Herald, Boston. 

Sold by all booksellers, or mailed, post-paid, on 
receipt of price, by the publishers. 

A. C. McCLURG & COMPANY, 
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<( Stirring events are graphically told in this series 
Of romances." — Home Journal, New York. 



TIMES OF GTJSTAF ADOLF. 

An Historical Romance of the Exciting 
Times of the Thirty Years' War. 

From the Original Swedish. 

BY Z. TOPELIUS. 

!2mo, extra cloth, black and gilt. Price 75 cents. 

"A vivid, romantic picturing of one of the most fascinating 
periods of human history." — The Times, Philadelphia. 

"Every scene, every character, every detail, is instinct with 
life. * * From beginning to end we are aroused, amused, 
absorbed." — The Tribune, Chicago. 

"The author has a genuine enthusiasm for his subject, and 
stirs up his readers' hearts in an exciting manner. The old times 
live again for us, and besides the interest of great events, there is 
the interest of humble souls immersed in their confusions. ' Scott, 
the delight of glorious boys,' will find a rival in these Surgeon 
Stories." — The Christian Register, Boston. 

" It is difficult to give an idea of the vividness of the descrip- 
tions in these stories without making extracts which would be 
entirely too long. It is safe to say, however, that no one could 
possibly fail to be carried along by the torrent of fiery narration 
which marks these wonderful tales. * * Never was the mar- 
velous deviltry of the Jesuits so portrayed. Never were the horrors 
of war painted in more lurid colors." — The Press, Philadelphia. 

" The style is simple and agreeable. * * There is a natu- 
ral truthfulness, which appears to be the characteristic of all 
these Northern authors. Nothing appears forced ; nothing 
indicates that the writer ever thought of style, yet the style is such 
as could not well be improved upon. He is evidently thoroughly 
imbued with the loftiest ideas, and the men and women whom he 
draws with the novelist's facility and art are as admirable as his 
manner of interweaving their lives with their country's battles 
and achievements." — The Graphic, New York. 

Sold by all booksellers, or mailed postpaid, on re- 
ceipt of price by the publishers. 

A. C. McCLURG & COMPANY, 
Cor. Wabash Ave. and Madison St., Chicago. 



** Most exquisitely written and translated." 

— Transcript, Boston. 

TIMES OF BATTLE AND REST. 

An Historical Romance of the Times of Charles X. and Charles 
XI. From the Swedish of Prof. Z. Topelius. (Vol. II. 
of "The Surgeon's Stories.") Price, 75 cents. 



"One of the most absorbing and fascinating books we have 
ever read. Its literary work is as perfect as the subject matter." 
— Home Journal, New York. 

"It excels in exciting incidents, fascinative narration and 
striking delineations of events and characters with which it has 
to deal." — Western Christian Advocate, Cincinnati. 

"These historical romances are some of the best literary 
work of our time, and the excellent translation of the volume be- 
fore us leaves nothing to be desired by the English reader." 
Manhattan, New York. 

"In the newly published second volume of Topelius' 'Sur- 
geon's Stories ' are to be praised the same wealth and originality 
of material and superior literary qualities which characterized the 
first cycle. The admirer of lofty romance cannot fail to be grate- 
ful for an introduction through this careful and spirited English 
version to the ' Scandinavian Scott, ' as Professor Topelius has 
often been called His works are glorious books for 3 oung peo- 
ple to read." — Independent, New York. 

"The second cycle of the ' Surgeon's Stones ' covers the 
reigns of the Swedish kings Charles X. and Charles XI., and 
gives a stirring and graphic account of the conquests of the first 
in Poland and Denmark, with the famous march of his army 
across the ice of Little Belt in 1658, and the more peaceful but 
important events of the reign of the second, especially the 
Witchcraft persecutions and the great Reduction. Prof. Topelius 
deals with the rich material before him like a true master of his- 
torical romance. * * * He displays great versatility, com- 
bining vivacious narrative, historic fidelity, and ready humor." — 
Good Literature, New York. 

Sold by all booksellers, or sent by mail, post- 
paid, on receipt of price by the publishers, 

A. C. McCLURG & COMPANY, 
Cor. Wabash Ave. an«l Madison St., Chicago. 



* Surely it is delightfully told, "-Pioneer Presi, St. Paul. 



TIMES OF CHARLES XII 

An Historical Romance of the times of Charles XII. From the 
Swedish of Prof. Z. Topelius. (Vol. III. of " The 
Surgeon's Stories.") Price, 75 cents. 

In this volume the admirable and popular series of " The 
Surgeon's Stories " has perhaps the richest subject in all Swedish 
history — the world-famous monarch, Charles XII., to whom Dr. 
Johnson applied his celebrated lines : 

" He left the name at which the world grew pale, 
To point a moral and adorn a tale." 

44 The work is the most brilliant in the series thus far, and 
imparts a knowledge of the history of the period in the most 
delightful manner." — Gazette, Boston. 

44 For strong and vivid scenes, dramatic power and effect, for 
novelty and enthusiastic interest, the stories are masterpieces. 
They ought to be read by every lover of fiction ; they will reveal 
to him new and artistic work." — Boston Globe. 

44 All who enjoyed (and who that read it did not enjoy it?) 
4 The Times of Gustaf Adolf,' will be eager to read this the third 
of the series ; a thrilling story of the thrilling times of 4 The Lion 
of the North,' written by the Walter Scott of the North." 

— Living Church, Chicago. 

44 We would much prefer teaching a youth Swedish history 
from the novels of Topelius than from any book of strict historical 
narrative. In the one case wo are confident the events will be 
remembered and the times will live ; in the other the chances are 
that the first will be forgotten and the second never realized." — 
New York Sun. 

44 We know of no author with whom to compare Topelius. 
He is vigorous and graphic, never verbose, never failing in interest. 
His books will attrrct the mature reader, and absorb the attention 
of children, and we commend them most heartily to all of these 
classes." — Courier, Cincinnati. 

Sold by all booksellers, or sent by mail, post-paid, 
on receipt of price, by the publishers, 

A. C. McCLURG & COMPANY, 
Cor. Wabash Ave. and Madison St., Chicago. 



"Swedish history has never been so attractively 
recorded." — Advance, Chicago. 



TIMES OF FREDERICK I. 

An Historical Romance of the period succeeding the reign of 
Charles XII. From the Swedish of Prof. Z. Topelius. 
(Vol. IV. of " The Surgeon's Stories.") Price, 75 cents. 



" The portrayal is that of a master hand, and the stirring tale 
of passion, the thread of the king's ring romance, running through 
it make a captivating and intensely thrilling production of literary 
genius." — Times, Troy, N. Y. 

" The l Times of Frederick I.' is wholly worthy the com- 
panionship of its predecessors. The characters are drawn with 
much of the picturesque force of Walter Scott, and the narrative 
is almost as animated and as genial as that of the elder Dumas 
in his historical novels." — Gazette, Boston, 

" Even more than former volumes does this book show a strik- 
ing resemblance to Scott in the power to make an historical epoch 
real and vivid to the reader's eyes. There is nothing finer in 
Scott than the scene in which the young count discovers the 
woman whom he loves in the wayside inn, surrounded by drunken 
noblemen, and rescues her by fighting three duels with the 
carousers." — Chronicle, San Francisco. 

" Its chief value is in its graphic description of the political 
feeling and action in the first years of peace after the war of 
twenty-one-years, and in its very perfect photographs of three 
leaders, Count Horn, Count Bertelskold, and Larsson. There are 
present, with undiminished force, the same knowledge of men 
and motives, the same skillful art and eloquent expression that 
have been exhibited so remarkably in the preceding works. The 
stories are classic in theme, treatment and style, and afford a 
satisfaction to literary taste that it seldom experiences in their 
class of fiction. Their qualities are entitled to conscientious 
study, and the time given to them will be repaid by the discovery 
of some rare beauties." — Globe, Boston. 

Sold by all booksellers, or sent by mail, post- 
paid, on receipt of price, by the publishers, 

A. C. McCLURG & COMPANY, 
Cor. Wabash Ave. and Madison St., Chicago. 



" It deserves a place with the very best fiction," 

— Standard, Chicago. 



TIMES OP LINNJEUS. 

An Historical Romance of the Times of the great Naturalist 
Linnaeus. From the Swedish of Prof. Z. Topelius. (Vol. 
V. of " The Surgeon's Stories.") Price, 75 cents. 



" Like its predecessors, the work bears a romantic charm and 
beauty of style that is rarely exceeded even in unmixed fiction." — 
Interior, Chicago. 

" The freshness, purity, and learning which have given these 
stories their exceptional reputation are all present in the latest. 
For the lover of flowers and plants this is as enjoyable as a ro- 
mance of botany, without any unnecessary intrusion of unknown 
terms." — Herald, Chicago. 

" The beauty, delicacy and tenderness of description in these 
stories can only be compared to the work of Sir Walter Scott. 
The subtle emotions of the human mind are sketched with a 
master hand. The heroic element combines the courage of a 
soldier, with the gentleness of a lover. The reader is tempted 
to exclaim in rapture, 'Why have we never known this people 
before ? ' " — Free Press, Detroit. 

" In the other four stories, Topelius has described part of the 
political as well as the social history of Sweden, and we have 
learned some things no other history has taught us, about the 
splendid campaigns of Gustaf Adolf and Charles the XII., but 
the author in the Times of Linnaeus, introduces us to far nobler 
battle fields, and to a conqueror whose name is, and forever will 
be, held in love and admiration by the students of natural science. 
As we follow with uninterrupted interest the course of this story, 
we are more than ever impressed with the clear, picturesque and 
dramatic style of its author. He records the history and charac- 
ter of the great naturalist, and at the same time portrays the 
romance of human passion with a skill which few modern novel- 
ists possess. We have on other occasions advised our readers to 
buy these stories. We more decidedly than ever before repeat 
this counsel." — Courier, Cincinnati. 

Sold by all booksellers, or sent by mail, post- 
paid, on receipt of price by the publishers, 

A. C. McCLURG & COMPANY, 
Cor. Wabash Ave. and Madison St., Chicago. 



* T7ie completion of ' The Surgeon's Stories 9 forms 
an event in modern literature," — Express, Buffalo. 



TIMES OF ALCHEMY. 

An Historical Romance of the Dawn of the Gustavian Period of 
Swedish History. From the Swedish of Prof. Z. 
Topelius. (Vol. VI., and last of " The Sur- 
geon's Stories.") Price, 75 cents. 



" As abundant in charm as the delightful historical romances 
of the elder Dumas." — Gazette, Boston. 

" This volume completes a charming series of stories, possess- 
ing not merely fine fancy, but having within them such faithful 
pictures of northern European life as can be found in no other 
books." — Christian Advocate, Chicago, 

" Perhaps in knowledge of the quiet expression of the heart, 
under influence of love, and in the beauty of its lessons, this is 
superior to all. * * They may be classed among the best books 
of contemporary fiction, and should be carefully read." — Globe, 
Boston. 

" The first conclusion— the only one (for who can criticise so 
charming a series as this has been ?) — is that there is not quite 
enough ' Alchemy,' for what there is makes us want more — in 
the unpretentious little book. But it is a clever wind up, never- 
theless, of an exceedingly clean and clever series, for the intro- 
duction of which the publishers deser'" 'arge credit." — Pioneer- 
Press, St. Paul. 

In the concluding voir x, of these great romances we are 
shown a striking picture of the superstition that prevailed amongst 
all classes of Swedish society before its clouds had yet been pene- 
trated and dissolved by the sunlight of exact science that followed 
the career of Linnaeus. This superstition is exemplified in the 
person of a mysterious alchemist and his experiments in search of 
the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. Many of the char- 
acters of the preceding volume appear in this, and the threads of 
all the stories are here united and brought to a fitting close. 

Sold by all booksellers, or sent by mail, post- 
paid, on receipt of price by the publishers, 

A. C. McCLURG & COMPANY, 
Cor. Wabash Ave. and Madison St., Chicago. 

H 132 82*1' 




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